Hall size (was tuned front duplexes)

[Phillip L Ford]

Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 10:55:20 -0800
From: "Delwin D Fandrich" <pianobuilders@olynet.com>
Subject: Re: Tuned front duplexes

- ----- Original Message -----
From: "Phillip L Ford" <fordpiano@lycos.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: November 08, 2001 5:40 PM
Subject: Re: Tuned front duplexes

> That's an interesting question.  500-750 sounds reasonable.  The halls
that
> I most like to hear piano performances in I would say must hold in the
> 200 - 500 range.

I was thinking of this more as a miximum....

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I understood that you were talking about maximum and I was talking about an ideal.
I gave this some more thought.  To give these numbers a bit more validity, at least
in my own mind, I thought of some specific halls and investigated how many each
would seat.  I found that all of my selected halls, the ideal, the maximum, and the just
too large seated more than I thought.  A couple of halls that I thought of as acceptable
but on the verge of being too big were 1000 seat halls.  A couple of halls that I thought
of as being a bit over the limit in size were 1200 - 1300 seat halls.  A couple that I
thought of as good were 500 seat halls.  I certainly wouldn't argue with a smaller hall
so I still will stick with my ideal as 200 - 500 but I would revise my maximum size
upward to 1000.  In my investigation I found out something that I didn't know.  One of
the halls that I thought of as good was Wigmore Hall in London.  When I went to their
website it turns out that Wigmore Hall was built in 1901 originally as Bechstein Hall.
It was next door to their sales rooms at the time.  It was built to be large enough to
showcase famous musicians but small enough to show the pianos to their best advantage.
It seats around 550 people.  So Bechstein at the turn of the century apparently had
similar feelings about hall size.

Phil

---
Phillip Ford
Piano Service & Restoration
1777 Yosemite Ave - 215
San Francisco, CA  94124