… I was able to recover from what was really a rather quiet Christmas this year (which shows that I must be getting less resilient to such things in my old age) to get back to my musical activities once again and sit in front of a piano, an oboe and cor anglais with a reasonably serious expression on my face and a quiet new year's resolution inspired determination to make more progress in the many musical areas that I now find myself involved in.
In particular, I was able to find a day where I could travel to Newcastle and visit the factory to do some recording on the ‘Ultimate’ 102note 2.9m grand piano. Despite the fact that the factory is theoretically on holidays, that doesn’t stop the necessity of the Stuarts being in the factory each day to deal with multitudinous emails and visitations etc, and of course nosy owners of Stuart pianos who want to come up and waste everyone’s time and patience recording esoteric music played in a not too convincing manner and hoping very much not to make any mistakes since this time a video recording is also being made, in high definition yet (trans: you can see all the wrinkles much more clearly).
As usual, I had a great time, talking about many other things other than pianos, but I was able to spend several hours doing my best to get everything right and by the time I have finished I had four reasonable recordings in the can, including a Pastorale by Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (No, not Nicolai, but a grandson of same) which is very effective on the Stuart. I had already recorded this at home and the results soundwise were very good, but I was anxious to try it out in the ‘White Room’ at the factory where I thought the acoustics would be better suited to the piece, and in fact this turned out to be the case.
GRK, despite his lineage, ran foul of the Stalin regime in the 1920s due to his (GRK’s) flirtation with avant-garde music (he was the first Soviet composer to dabble in quarter tone music) and suffered the consequences as a result. Very little of his music survives, and I obtained this piece only in manuscript, but now have typeset it as well. The piece lends itself perfectly to the Stuart:
1) the use of the two soft pedals, either singly or in tandem
2) the use of the extended bass notes (added in since GRK didn’t have a Stuart piano to play with)
3) the amazing power and sustain throughout the range which gives rise to some quite unusual tonal effects throughout the piece.
I used two microphone setups to record. The first was two Rode NT3 microphones which I have had for a while now and give very sensitive and good sound across the range, coupled with a Rode shotgun microphone placed in the main body of the room to capture more of the ambient sound. The second was an Earthworks PianoMic system, which actually sits right inside the piano but nonetheless puts out quite a superb sound. The mix is untouched with no equalisation or limiting, and the result is quite spectacular with both microphone types.
I must be improving, because it only took me two takes to get a good video recording which just about every note close to the way I wanted it. It is never easy to play anything on the Stuart because as I have said before it amplifies everything I do even slightly wrong, but this time I did what I thought was a reasonable job by my standards.
So rather than simply put out the audio files as I have done in the past, I have now created a YouTube channel for the ‘Ultimate Piano’,
here, and have placed this video which can be viewed in up to 720p resolution (that’s 1280x720). I did record at 1080p but I think the file sizes are too big and I can’t see the advantage at this stage.
So I will add to this as I go along, not just videos but also straight audio as well. The aim is to build up a series of performances which will showcase the piano (at least at my level of performance), and it will show (hopefully!) that mere mortals like myself can get a huge amount out of these pianos.
And if I can, so can you