The Dutch born Australian pianist Gerard Willems has just recorded Beethoven’s Thirty Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli on the 102-key Stuart piano, and has also recently performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.1 in C major with the Sydney University Symphony Orchestra in the Great Hall at Sydney University, a venue I know very well having been a student there all those years ago.
Radio and Television coverage of these was actually very good, and may be found
here in audio form (please ignore the obvious and somewhat annoying name mispronunciations) and a report from the ABC’s 7.30 Report
here.
All very positive, and Willems makes a number of very salient points regarding the sound of the piano and why he plays the way he does. He uses the term ‘spring clean’ in the context of the renewal of the music and this is something that I have been very vocal about since I first acquired the piano – any attempt to play music in the same way as would be played on a ‘standard’ piano just will not work. You have to reinvent the way you play, and if you do that successfully the music too is reinvented and renewed.
The main problem is, as always, the innate conservatism of the piano listening public, and the majority of pianists who are stuck in a groove of their own experiences and refuse to admit that the pianistic world has passed them by and they are now floundering in a sea of memories – looking for comfort in a world which in many other spheres is no longer anything like it was.
Many people will never understand the why’s and wherefore’s, the principles and the ethos of these pianos. They don’t realise that things can change, and for the better. Music can be reinvented in ways that previous generations and indeed the composers themselves never imagined – because the tools just weren’t there.
Many more people have now seen and heard the Ultimate Piano ™ thanks to the above broadcasts. It remains to be seen whether this will herald a new appreciation of how music and the piano can and should develop, or whether the Steinways of this world will simply allow piano music to stagnate much as it has for many years now.
Conservatism is not part of my musical vocabulary.