… to be confident that he or she will be able to get the most out of a Stuart piano?
I was reminded of this yesterday when I had the pleasure of a visit by a family who I have known for a while now and I regard as very special people. Dr Nuli Lemoh is the driving force behind the construction of the Children’s Hopsital in Bo, Sierra Leone – the project for which we were able to raise quite a deal of money back in May this year at my recital.
He and his wife Margaret are quite delightful in many ways (in particular Nuli’s national dress is sartorially far superior to anything I have in my wardrobe) and I’ve always said that any offspring they have must also be equally as talented as they are.
And, I was right.
Their daughter Tonya is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium and has spent the last few years in Denmark, where she has not only developed a very busy schedule as a concert, chamber and recording artiste but also now teaches at the University of Copenhagen. She is visiting family and friends here for the next month or so, and is giving a fundraising concert for the Bo Hospital at, of all places, the Stuart & Sons factory in Newcastle on the 20th of December at 2.00pm.
Whilst she has some knowledge of the Stuart piano, obviously throwing her off the deep end as it were at the recital would not allow her to really come to grips with the extraordinary capabilities of these pianos. In all likelihood, she will play one of the two pianos mentioned in the previous posting.
So I decided to kill two birds with one stone – invite the family down so that I could see Nuli and Margaret again, and importantly meet Tonya and let her loose to give her some first hand exposure to the Stuart piano. I was not disappointed with either.
I explained in some detail about the sonority, pedals, dynamic range, sustain etc and illustrated these with appropriate bits of Debussy, Tan Dun as well as others, with appropriate apologies for my limited level of performance. Tonya then settled down and began to explore. As she progressed I began to realise that I was hearing different sounds to what I was used to hearing on the piano, and that was not necessarily because Tonya was playing music that I don’t play. She was experimenting with all sorts of combinations and it was then that I knew
why she was coming to grips with the piano in such a relatively short time.
She was listening. Purely and simply, she was listening - and she knew what she was listening for.
She was sensitive to the music, to the sounds, to the feel - the most important quality that a pianist can have. At the end of the day, she knew what would work and what would not work as well, and that gave her the information she needed to finalise her programme for the 20th December.
It reinforced a couple of the principles that I’ve had in mind for a while now:
• Don’t be afraid of the bass. On any other piano, including the Steinways I have played, hitting the bass hard overpowers everything else, not so much in terms of the volume but the ‘murkiness’ of the harmonics interferes with everything else. The Stuart piano, having a very clean bass, does not react in this way and the bass is in fact complementary rather than detrimental to the rest of the piano.
• Don’t be afraid of the dynamic range. The Stuart can be loud, but not painfully so as in the case of so many other pianos. As Margaret commented, the piano doesn’t overpower you – it envelops you with sound. Quite unique.
I learnt a lot myself, and that is why I know this recital will be very special.