“The exclusive little club of the world’s most valuable pianos just got a new member,” writes Robert Thicknesse in Monday’s (6/1) Wall Street Journal. The piano belongs to Daniel Barenboim, “who designed it together with the Belgian piano-maker Chris Maene. It took 4,000 man-hours and 18 months to build, and last Wednesday was its public unveiling, the first of four concerts at [London’s] Royal Festival Hall in which Mr. Barenboim is playing from memory all 11 of Franz Schubert’s completed piano sonatas.… After playing Franz Liszt’s restored piano in 2011 in Siena, Italy, Mr. Barenboim vowed to create an instrument combining the power of a modern grand with the transparency and discrete notes, colors and registers he had felt and heard there…. There is something orchestral in the different textures of its low, middle and high registers—that is an echo of the old fortepiano…. The clarity of the notes makes it more than ever up to the player to create blend and legato.” A separate article at BBC4 includes an interview with Barenboim about his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose musicians include Israelis and Palestinians and which is scheduled to perform at this summer’s Proms in London.
Posted June 3, 2015
