My Hour With A Fazioli Piano

I really like my Yamaha upright piano.  It's about as good a piano as I could have ever hoped to own.  It is not perfect, and it has idiosyncrasies.  Like all pianos.  Most of my practicing and performing life I have played on Yamahas, both uprights and grands.  I've never given a concert on a Steinway, but have had lessons on them.  Old pianos, not so great ones.  But today was a real treat, as I got to run through my Bach and Grieg program on Dr. S.'s four year old Fazioli.  The piano itself is a piece of woodworking art, both inside and underneath.  They are acclaimed by many as the finest in piano craftsmanship known.  I can now vouch for that statement.  This one was beautiful, a 7' grand, model 212 (length in cms).  Here is a picture of it from the Fazioli website.

The model I played on today.  It retails today for $157,000 US. If I sell my house, I can get one!

Angela Hewitt swears by hers, and she plays a lot of Bach.  Today I started with 6 pieces by that composer.  The piano spoke beautifully, each separate voice line heard clearly and cleanly.  The bass range has a warmth to it that will work well for a lot of literature, though a more growling bass might be preferred for Beethoven, for example.  The mid-range and upper range are both perfection, with a creamy sound that is hard to describe, rich and forthcoming.  Loud tones resonate really well, without harshness, and softer tones can whisper and still maintain plenty of body.  The six pieces by Grieg that I played all test different aspects of the piano, though being called Lyric Pieces, lyricism is at the heart of all of them.  

The Shepherd Boy took me away from this world into another one.  Gentleness, loneliness, the cruelty of being isolated from fellow humans, are just some of the emotions the composer was after here.  From pp to ff, the piano spoke wonderfully for the entire piece.  In the Peasants' March I had trouble with the fff passages.  After stopping to figure out what was wrong, I realized that I was pushing the piano too hard.  It was unnecessary.  This piano will work for the player, making our job easier than we might think.  I tried the super loud passage again, without trying to kill the piano with sound.  I didn't strive to reach that fff, but I think I realized it much better than my first attempt.  Allowing the sound to build up without crushing  it seemed to work much better than brute force.  The March of The Dwarfs was a revelation to me.  This piano can do staccato better than any other piano I have ever played, both loud and soft.  And now that I didn't push for more sound, but rather politely insisted instead, the loud parts worked beautifully.  The singing lyrical mid-section (when the forest nymphs, fairies, pixies and whatever come back out to play after the passing of the dwarf hoard) took me into near ecstatic realms of beautiful tonal washes.  I probably won't play these pieces nearly so well at the upcoming gathering of pianists here, but for a short time, I sounded amazing lol!!

It did take me some time to get used to the piano, (but I am coming from an upright) so I recommend bringing more than one piece to the group in June.  If time permits I will perform the three Grieg pieces mentioned above (I played the other three on Paula's perfectly lovely Yamaha grand last month).

Robert and Yvonne also have an amazingly beautiful home, filled with art.  I felt very welcome.  If a bedroom becomes available, I might ask to move in

Mapman Mike

 

New Piano Repertoire

First the big news--it rained!  So far since yesterday we have received 1.2 inches of rain, very badly needed.  So it's back to cutting grass, beginning tomorrow.  The humidity today is unbearable, however, with the possibility of more rain to come.  We'll take it.

In other news, Patti's older sister, Joanne, has finally friended me on FB.  So maybe I will be able to find out some things about Patti, past 20 years of age.  Fingers crossed.

I have been working on newer piano pieces for just over a week now.  While the fingers aren't too happy, the brain is dancing once again.  Several years ago Deb and I attended the finest music festival we ever heard.  It was the Great Lakes Chamber Society's annual June festival, and the theme was Bach and his later influence on composers.  So we got to hear a ton of Bach concerts, along with composers who took his works and used them to make their own pieces even greater, composers such as Beethoven and Rachmaninoff.  My little brain has been ticking ever since, and I was overjoyed to discover that our complete set of Bach music CDs has a whole category of recordings on the same subject, with dozens of composers who used Bach as a rich resource for their own music.

Anyway, my newest program will feature 6 pieces by Bach on the first half.  I am going to pair a Little Prelude with a 2-part Invention, another Little Prelude with a 3-part Invention (also called a Sinfonia), and finally a Prelude and Fugue from the Well Tempered Clavier, all in the key of d minor.  This means that the first half will feature music that gradually becomes more contrapuntal and complex, until we arrived at the d minor fugue (Book 1).  Clever, huh?  Three of the pieces are quite flashy, including the lively Gigue of the Prelude and Fugue, while three are more sedate.

But wait--there's more!  The second half will feature the music of Edvard Grieg, namely his Op. 54 Lyric Pieces.  There are six of them (same as the first half of the program by Bach), though I am only working on four at the moment, but upon hearing them listeners will be able to find traces of Bach (and many others, to be sure) in the music.  Two of the pieces in the set are quite well known and popular, the March of the Dwarves, and his Nocturne. 

In movie news, there are two to report, both my choices for the week.  Blood Simple, from 1984, was the first feature film by the Coen brothers, a dark comedy/tragedy that takes place in a small Texas town, much of it in a seedy bar.  There are four main characters, one of whom is a private detective played wonderfully by M. Emmet Walsh.  He first tracks a cheating wife for the husband, who then wants his wife dead.  There are some great plot twists and tense moments, but overall viewers are led by the nose by the directors, and by the end it all becomes a bit much.  The wife and her boyfriend, a bartender at her husband's bar, are cardboard characters.  The husband is a loser in just about everything (though he did catch some nice fish), and provides much of the dark humour in the film.  Heavy premonitions of Fargo can be seen and felt in the film.  Mostly fun, but not a classic.  There are many, many extras with this film, of which we have two of the shorter ones.

Now showing on Criterion. 

 

My going away choice for this week was a silent film from 1929, starring Anna May Wong.  It was called Piccadilly, and provided a plum role for the actress.  She works as a scullery maid in a fancy London nightclub, but after the owner sees her dance, he hires her for his club.  Jealousy and murder add to the colour of this well made film.  Great sets and costumes, and Miss Wong is very pleasing to look at.  Not a bad film at all.

 

 Now showing on Criterion, until August 31st.  There are some impressive hats in this movie. 

 

Mapman Mike