The Lost Sound - a documentary about the fortepiano

[Music] you [Music] i'm in ostender where peter von jersey lives he's an artist and a piano collector and i'm here with wolfgang roof he's a swiss collector and he wants to try to buy a forte piano built by nanette estrella annette streicher was a very famous piano builder and good friend was beethoven we the people who can do it you know collect pianos no nobody else it's quite an obscure uh item at the piano what is important in piano history it's it's you you you need to become an organologist i think if you collect as well you need to study the actual the action is quite extraordinary [Music] [Music] is it starts off with something small it's going to start with one piano or two early pianos you know so it's a passion that star everything that we collect we collect with the purpose and so what can i say about it not much actually okay that's probably good enough i think thank you double repetition it uh is [Music] okay or we could put him here yeah good idea [Music] we bought that one with the uh with the guarantee that it was played by beethoven of course we know how to move them you know what is important for a piano you know humidity and the conditions well i understand that golfing is extremely keen on this piano but i i i definitely don't want to park with it but the interesting thing is that this piano is extremely worth yes the tail really goes yes in this way very very bad it's not so bad actually it's uh you don't worry about it it's a natural thing yeah the the fact that it's warping uh you told this last time though yeah he does he brings it back to he brings it back yes it's a natural thing the same with michael it's not being done by some bills and and last time we were here we looked at the bottom of the instrument yeah and the construction is that way that it can't be very stable and that's why yes yeah so warped yes wolfgang is a collector you are i am why are we doing this i mean we hardly play maybe or [Music] yes so i don't play the piano i i'm a piano tuner so i'm in love with the sound of the piano and the sound of a piano for me is a philosophical thing why do you have to live with that sound why certainly why at a certain moment in time did we have that piano sound and what is it what is a piano sound a why this sound it's a it's a it's quite an amazing question i think [Music] so here i am playing a mozart sonata on a steinway and this wonderful steinway which is an instrument i play a great deal of the time has characteristics that all pianists take for granted but i think one needs to think about them a little bit because they are part of the development of the modern piano but they have great consequence for how older music is played if one looks at this piano one sees that there is this very very large iron plate and that plate results in the possibility of placing the strings under a vast amount of tension the tension is above 20 000 kilograms and as a result of that the amount of time it takes for the sound to develop is considerable [Music] if you listen [Music] it takes about that amount of time for the sound to bloom one of the consequences of that is that people who play these kinds of pianos don't like to play detached because the sound gets kind of you know in a way suffocated before the sound becomes very nice now the miraculous thing of course about parallel strong instruments the harpsichord and period pianos viennese pianos but not just viennese pianos early pianos all of them were parallel strong is that you can play with both hands at equal volume and everything is interesting and it sounds very good it's very exciting because the sound is brighter because the strings are thinner the overtone spectrum is more towards the top so it's a more brilliant kind of sound and we can hear we hear very clearly that this is a c major chord we have no trouble distinguishing the notes from one another anyone will tell me i can't hear the melody listen again this instrument which is designed more to sing than to speak and this instrument is more to speak than to sing will inspire composers to write music which is designed for the characteristics of the instrument i've heard many people say if beethoven knew the steinway he most definitely would have preferred it that misses the point to the extent that beethoven would have written the same music for the steinway as he wrote for this to that extent he is not a very good composer because just the way a great tailor makes a suit or a dress for a particular person a composer creates music which is suitable for the particular acoustical and physical characteristics of the instrument at hand does not write for some instrument which may come along in 50 years which may have completely different sound characteristics [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] it's really in a very bad condition and instruments like this are really worth absolutely everything to get them back in the best condition i started almost 40 years ago starting with modern pianos trying to learn to tune them and regulate them and everything well after i started working on modern pianos i got more and more interested in antique things i like old things anyway furniture or paintings or i'm very interesting in old things antique and things so it was obvious that i got interested in antique pianos as well and i found the first square piano about 35 years ago and tried to let's say in that time fix it up and which wasn't very successful but one learns in time and nowadays i'm only working on very early historical pianos that's what i what i love to do we could see with this striker piano which is in such bad condition and almost all the early 40pms are in very bad condition you can see them as hidden treasures it's like a hidden treasure the early pianos tell you a lot about the music in that time every time has his own accomplishments and is his own taste and if you hear a mozart piano which is very clear it has a very thin sound board and that's why it's so clear because the sound board is very light but when a romantic period starts let's say 1820 or something beethoven and schubert then the taste changed a lot and people wanted pianos more to sing and have a longer tone well the way you can do it is make the soundboard thicker and heavier you can imagine to bring a thicker soundboard in motion you need heavier strings and if you have thicker strings with more tension you need bigger hammers heavier hammers to get it in motion and actually that is what history of the piano is it's not because the former stage was not good i used to play the piano seriously but that's a long time ago if you're so focused on what you're doing and what you're working with one gets distracted immediately one note is a bit out of tune another a bit too loud or too soft so i start doing something about that instead of playing [Music] well it's a wonderful profession this try to get the instruments who are here and being restored by a stride to get them as perfect as possible [Music] the thing is that these very thin sound boards are very vulnerable for climate changes so it gets out of the car into the hole then the thing heats up and then the soundboard starts to move and it can be that the whole tuning goes up and that's why i'm so happy we have these wonderful tuning machines nowadays because this is the the right reference to to be able to tune the piano on 430 which is very important for the win players i'm always nervous and i actually i can't enjoy the concert either because i'm always listening if the piano is still in tune or not so that's quite a hassle [Music] what made me start playing playing the forte piano it's a sort of multi-stage process in a sense when i was in australia growing up i collected cds obsessively um from about the age of 12 or 13 and there are a few things that really stick in my mind as major major turning points in my understanding of the sound of early music you cannot imagine as a 12 year old the kind of overwhelming emotional force of hearing the sound of these instruments played so beautifully the mozaicun charges with john elliott malcolm was one of those things that just completely revamped and revolutionized my idea of what it sounds like to hear a mozart piano concerto not only the unbelievably vivid orchestral playing but this incredibly silvery delicate transparent vocal and yet at the same time speaking piano sound that that was captured so well in that cycle [Music] so i immediately became obsessed with the idea of playing the forte piano but in australia kind of outback style we didn't have any forte pianos there's one now in brisbane but at that time there was nothing there were two things that struck me the first was that once you got over the unbelievable awkwardness of the action the size of the keys and the incredible refinement that you need to play these pianos what struck me is that the emotional scale of mozart's music especially is so well served by these instruments because of the kind of extremes that you can use you know you can play incredibly fortissimo and i could really lay into the storm and tongue sections without any fear of the piano kind of bubbling over and on the other hand you have this sound of tenderness and lyricism in which you can play incredibly piano as well and these extremes suddenly made sense to me and in all the years i'd played mozart on the steinway i'd been so exasperated by the constant need to play everything sort of grazioso and mezzo piano and here finally was an instrument that kind of speaks the emotional scale of this music but without exaggeration in either in either direction [Music] i've never seen a one which was constructed so badly as this one and this is the famous nanette striker [Music] so [Music] we're extremely lucky here to have this team i've been working with johan for more than 30 years now and caroline and beppy have been here for 22 years we know each other so well all together it makes a wonderful team so [Music] [Music] do foreign so this is the nanetti structure piano taken apart the most twisted piano i ever saw and actually no wonder because the inner construction is of only straight and cross beams made of only soft wood glued together and very interesting of course on top of the beam we have most of the tension and normally what you always see if pianos have this kind of construction like conrad graph the upper beam goes through because then it's the most strong strong of course but in this case the upper layer is glued against the cross beams and if you as you can see this is really squeezed together it's not strong at all and i'm kind of surprised actually that it's only soft wood so how strong is this i've been renting out my pianos for more than 30 years now so i have seen a lot of hotel rooms not only concerts but also a lot of recordings i think maybe over 200 recordings have been made with several pianos of my collection [Applause] for this recording andreas decided to use the irrad 1837 for his new schumann program for schumann foreign [Music] my feet [Music] immediately i loved the sound and i did fall in love with this here with the sound of 40 piano and well of course i mean i i do play progressively more and more for the pianos but i always have this fear is what if they finally find out that i actually cannot do this and you know me very well i i get always very insecure and afraid and all that but um i think training on the forte piano specifically is a problematic issue anyway because i wish i was a harpsichord player that would help me a lot to play better 40 piano so i did not approach it from the right direction modern piano action and sound is quite universal i mean i would never prefer playing mozart on a modern piano but i think one can giving the right constellation [Music] and if you are playing in a 3000 hole it's another tragic story of today how many times have i been asked to play uh in a in a big hole on the 40 piano because now it's it's a bit fashionable and nobody realizes that it's not for nothing that the pianos got so much bigger and louder this sound world and the type of relationship that these instruments have to the text is not accidental at all it's really part of the fabric of the rhetoric and you see that with mozart you see that with beethoven you see that with schumann and schubert these composers had such high respect for the instruments and the craftsmanship of the writing reflects their ideas of what these pianos do well and what they don't do well and that is a lesson that i still remind myself of every day when i'm playing a certain repertoire on a certain instrument because it's it's so liberating to to finally see that these composers have a very strong connection to their equipment and not just this kind of lofty abstract ideal of waiting for the steinway to come around at the end of the 19th century [Music] in some ways it's more exciting because it's much more rich in upper overtones and for my mind even more radical more revolutionary on this piano than it is on that one one feels that beethoven is taking this instrument to its outer boundaries when you hear the emperor concerto and there's the fight between the orchestrality when you hear a full orchestra of beethoven's time playing fortissimo and the piano plays back you think this soloist is mad he's taking on a whole orchestra they can crush him like a fly but how exciting it is that the piano is taking on the orchestra like that whereas in the steinway it's an equal contest so of course it's fine the piano shouts the orchestra shouts and that's very very exciting but this idea that beethoven is taking us over the edge of the cliff is something for which this instrument is supremely capable so you have to think about these things and again we come back to beethoven would he have preferred the steinway well it would be very interesting to see the kind of music he would have written for the steinway but as far as i'm concerned the music that he wrote for this kind of instrument is so extraordinary that it's up to us to play in such a way that we hear his personal voice on the instrument which was the only one that he knew and that he loved people can come to a concert like tonight and expect to hear a very well-tuned beautiful instrument in a very flattering acoustic and so we can start to talk about the music seriously again [Music] but you know we're so lucky now as for t pianist to have at our disposal this collection of instruments in various locations not just in europe but around the world and earlier when i started doing this there were a couple of really terrible ones and i think i learned very quickly uh it's a sort of matrix now of connections between builders who are on very good terms with one another which is another amazing thing about the field it certainly could have gone much differently than that um so actually i'm i feel incredibly lucky to know that let's say tonight we're playing the graph copy from your collection or next week the lagrasa or let's say the arad for a mendelson concerto or something like that i mean to know that you have instruments of that quality when you get to a hall on the same day of a concept for example is just such luxury [Music] uh [Music] is [Music] is [Music] my father was very young when he died he played the piano and his dream was once have a little grand piano but he never succeeded there was no money in the past so maybe i overcompensated this um [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] i hope you can see that the tail is really turned and we we want to pull it up this but underneath we're going to steam it and make it quite hot underneath and soak the wood soak the inside only and that's why this is going to be insulated here it's only for the inside because the veneer on the outside should stay where it is [Music] yeah this be it's this terrible thing you can't imagine why it exists anyhow because i mean why didn't anybody throw it away 80 years ago or 100 years ago [Music] oh so now the case of the piano is straight but the problem with this piano is that all the gluing joints are loose everywhere this should be a very stable construction which contains you can can stand 5 000 kilograms of string tension but well i'll show you some things which should be very solid this is all loose here we see i have to put on my glasses here are gluing joints so this whole piano has a construction of uh pieces of wood glued together like a brick construction should be rebuilt actually when this first sounds come out of the piano sometimes it's magnificent immediately straight it's a great surprise sometimes a piano gets wonderful after one year of playing it really blooms up it opens up and and starts starts blooming and other instruments immediately have it how is that possible man they're all pieces of wood no idea edwin um thank you foreign [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] i'm moving these pianos for concerts but they get heavier every year i don't know how long i can do this [Music] sonata [Music] okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] but it has been used quite a lot with orchestras also and i never had any complaints no i never had complaints about not being it not being loud enough or something so the balance will be fine that's not the problem yeah and as juliana says what we need to do all right on the first day of our rehearsal with the orchestra is to not discuss too much but just to have the two positions the classical position where she plays with the lid in front and the position that we love so much with her in the orchestra yeah surrounded by uh by us i was in japan once in a tour and the halls i saw were all fantastic beautiful beautiful halls yeah beautiful can you play it once more just a little piece [Music] okay bye see you in jamaica [Music] instruments are very rare it's not so easy for pianists to get in contact with the good ones and unfortunately there are a lot of bad ones in the world and they are quite misleading they sound very bad and what should people think [Music] there are a few here there are some collections in europe in japan but they're not all in very good shape many of these pianists like ronald braudigam or robert levin alexander melikov or under ashif play on modern pianos most of the time but they love to play on early instruments too [Music] hmm [Music] foreign um is [Music] i like jizz and i try to play some jazz myself on the floor to piano and it always sounds very nice and now you can hear it it's wonderful and it's great that these young guys are doing really new things with them it's fantastic [Music] okay um we're in tokyo we brought an era piano for one concert we took all this trouble to bring it here and um getting all the papers right that was the big nightmare it has ivory on the keys obviously but that's the big trouble getting ivory out of the country i suppose if you want to export or import 10 crates of kalashnikovs it's no problem they can go through immediately but an old piano there we have to be careful is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] music foreign [Music] is [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] i think in general opinion is that music which i play is not coming because my fingers are moving in the right direction not because of my pianistic skills but i reproduce with my fingers what i hear inside and that's why i think it's it's not not a problem for me to to change the instrument because it's not it's the music which i play not the i don't know finger memory where the fingers really memorize where they have to where they have to press buttons or something so i think it's only about your imagination about your fantasy and go about your feeling of music [Music] i have to say it's also a very special piano which you brought here to tokyo dynamics of the piano is absolutely phenomenal because it you can play very very soft and it has still it doesn't it it has so many colors in it and so many overtones and also you can play also good fortissimo and that never sounds weak or ugly or something it's a absolutely great gentlemen [Music] playing on on this type of pianos is like like you're in a kind of time machine because you're going back into the time where chopin was leaving and you hear what he have uh what he has heard as he was composing this music because there was no other piano so he couldn't see i don't think that he could imagine that his pieces will be played on a grand concert piano in a big concert halls like for two or three thousand people okay music [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] um [Music] so [Music] okay it's about one and a half years now after we started this restoration and it took us 1600 hours the instrument should convince us this is the right sound for the music composed in that period once you work 400 hours you won't stop if you spend 1100 hours and you're still not satisfied or you're not ready at all you have to go on and on and on the result has to be magnificent just a nice piano is not good enough [Music] wolfgang roof the owner will see the piano for the first time since he bought it in our standard two years ago get out of here so so so [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Edwin Beunk Fortepiano Collection

Views: 16,067

Keywords: fortepiano, early piano, edwin beunk collection, Erard piano, Nannette Streicher, piano history, Chopin piano concertos, Robert Schumann, French piano, viennese piano, fortepiano recording, schubert piano, beethoven piano

Id: UPB9c69iByA

Length: 62min 48sec (3768 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022