… well, not so much a problem as something I have to think about and come up with a reasonable solution in a relatively short space of time.
At Tonya’s recital on the 20th December, I will have the privilege of introducing her to the audience gathered to hear her play. That is not a problem – I’ve done this on quite a few occasions over the years and certainly know how to do this in the right way – and there is a right and wrong way, believe me.
But I have another task. As well as introducing Tonya, I will spend about five (hopefully!) minutes explaining to the audience the whys and wherefors of the Stuart piano. Most of the audience will not have visited the factory before, and certainly very few of them will know much if anything at all about the pianos and why they are different to what has come before.
I have to try to get across why this recital is different, why the Stuart piano in the right hands (or fingers in this case) can add so much over and above the accepted norm for recitals and what they can listen for in order to appreciate both the piano and the pianiste.
As I have posted before, the Stuart piano has the following advantages over a ‘normal’ piano:
1) The clarity of sound
2) The long and powerful sustain
3) The dynamic range - how easy it is to play very soft and then to follow with a thunderous volume.
4) The dynamic possibilities enabled by the two left pedals - the
dolce and the
una corda with the option of depressing the two simultaneously.
5) The unique behaviour of the attack and decay transients of the sound.
6) The almost total lack of low frequency masking which is the tendency of the lower frequencies to obscure or over power the upper frequencies producing the thick dull sound common in the average acoustic piano.
7) The additional keys to facilitate the performance of repertoire written since around 1840 for 8 octaves and more. The piano's practical frequency range is 102 keys, subcontra C to f above the traditional top c.
In addition, there are the features of the Stuart piano which make it ideal to experience the vertical colour of the sound. In most conventional Western composition, tone colour had been regarded as a secondary element of musical expression and to counter this, musical instruments were designed to give off a specific tone colour or character bias e.g. Bosendorfer, Steinway etc. Tone colour represents the harmonic and phasing interactions within a sound envelope that enliven and highlight the musical structure – the sounds architecture. 20th century music invites us to walk in, look around and move through, it encourages us to listen for the fine-tuning of the harmonic series, the attack and decay transients of the sound envelope, balance between tone and noise, the perpetual play of shifting hues. If in most traditional Western art music tone colour may be said to adorn the structure, then in minimalist music the structure often adorns the tone colour. The vertical dimension, the physiology or architecture of sound, is concerned with space and tone colour. The horizontal dimension, the written notation or score is concerned with time and content – conceptual aesthetics and ideologies.
Five minutes? More like five hours …
Help!!!