The strongest music/player I dealt with was Christopher Taylor playing the Messiaen 20 Views of the Infant Jesus. Before the program started he asked about a bass note (C#1 I think) that was hitting the damper wire. I tried to duplicate it and I couldn't hit it hard enough. The damper wire was exactly between the two unicords. He said "that's OK it just adds to the effect". No one else has ever hit it that hard since. The piano was a Nossaman D+ that had just come back and this was the first performance on it. I checked the tuning at intermission and it had held wonderfully and I didn't touch a tuning pin. I did have to dry the keyboard, fallboard, tuning pin field and floor from the sweat. He worked like no one else I've ever heard! The music critic for the Dallas Morning News had to wait until late the next day to write the review as he was so moved by the performance. It was number 1 on his year-ending list of the best concerts of that year. dp David M. Porritt, RPT dporritt at smu.edu From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Susan Kline Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 1:34 AM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: Re: [CAUT] Toughest piece for piano stability? On 11/7/2010 12:47 PM, Paul T Williams wrote: What is the most powerful piece you've ever voiced/tuned for? There was the time Constantine Orbelian played the Schnittke concerto on the SD-10 at Newport .... There were a few performances by Leon Bates, various big pieces. There was the time the nice Chinese man who had studied in Leningrad played Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme of Corelli ... There was the symphony concert with three different Russian pianists, each playing a different concerto ... There was a piece by Olivier Messiaen which had pages and pages of loud passage work in the very top register of the piano ... And this afternoon a wonderful Croatian pianist (Martina Filjak) played three sonatas by Soler, two Chopin Ballades, a Prokofiev Sonata, two Scriabin Preludes, and finished with Islamey by Balakirev. But you know, I think that the piano and the pianist both have a lot more to do with how the tuning survives than the pieces played. Martina, for instance, had a tremendous dynamic range and certainly didn't hold back; but when I tuned early this afternoon after she had practiced, I realized that she just was not the kind of pianist to throw anything very far out. Now that I think about it, all the performances listed did not mess up the tuning much at all. I think I must be blanking out on the ones which did ... Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101108/d51a025f/attachment-0001.htm>
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