I know that, of course, but it seems as though many people don’t.
I’ve made the point many times that playing a Stuart piano requires a totally different mindset to that required for what I might call a
‘traditional’ piano. Most of the comment I see and hear still is very much hidebound by the traditions of the piano built up over the last 150 years and the sense of
‘comfort’ or
‘not wanting to change’ that this engenders.
Janet Brewer, from the Queensland Conservatorium of Music at Griffith University, has submitted a thesis for the Master of Music, Performance Research degree entitled
“It’s not a Steinway – Features and Perspectives of the Stuart and Sons Piano”. Her work uses a qualitative research methodology including surveys, interviews and subsequent discourse analysis to investigate the distinctive characteristics of the Stuart piano through the perspectives of experienced professional pianists who have performed both solo and chamber repertoire on Stuart pianos.
Her overall conclusion is very much along the lines that I have espoused in this blog (and I wrote most of that before I had read her thesis) that playing the Stuart requires a different approach to clarity, touch and resonance and that the design stimulates the performer to draw on their experience and skill to provide something innovative in their interpretations.
What the results point out is that there is considerable variation in performers’ views about how particular types of music can and should sound. There was general acceptance that the piano is easily adaptable to baroque, classical and post-19th century music, but opinions were divided as to romantic music as typified by Chopin, Brahms and (say) Rachmaninoff, where the sonority (i.e overall frequency mix) was seen by some (but by no means all) to be lacking.
This type of music certainly relies very heavily on producing sound canvasses across the entire keyboard range and the combinations thereof are critically important to the human ear, but it seems to me as a (by now) experienced player of one of these pianos that the human ear is the problem. We are so used to the complexity (i.e. muddiness in many cases) of many pianos’ sounds that we have become desensitised to the qualities of the resonance itself. What the Stuart piano allows is a clearer definition to the listener of the composer’s structure and harmonies, and it is that clarity which I suspect people find difficult to adjust to.
I play Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninoff (as well as many others of that genre) and am finding that I’m appreciating the music much more because I can hear the harmonies much more clearly. In addition, that clarity is enabling me to expand using the extra notes to further explore the sounds that the composer may have had in his mind at the time he wrote the notes down.
If it is felt that “the performance of the rich textures of Romantic music was deficient”, the cure for that deficiency lies in the fingers of the performer. The result will be different to the norm, but that is all to the good because this piano can redefine the norm if the brain controlling the fingers is good enough.
The Stuart requires you to reinvent the way you play. The results of this thesis confirm that view. It also shows even so-called professional pianists quite often cannot get the old outdated ways out of their system. If you can do that, you’re on the way to a totally new and exciting experience that no other piano can match.