Andras Schiff: Steinway is too dominant

From an interview with BR-Klassik:

The world of piano music has become very one-sided—to put it bluntly, globalized. Steinway dominates the piano world. Steinway is a wonderful grand piano—but not all Steinways are the same. Audiences and pianists have accepted, almost without a word, that no matter where or by whom piano music is heard, it will be played on a Steinway. To that, I would like to say: Please be open-minded and continue playing, but not exclusively on Steinways. There are also Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Fazioli, or Yamaha —or whatever they are called. It doesn’t always automatically have to be a Steinway.

In the past, there were different instruments. In the time of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, there were more than 100 or 200 piano makers working in Vienna alone, and all the instruments were completely different. What can the old instruments do that a modern grand piano can’t? A modern grand piano prides itself on being completely balanced from top to bottom. The old instruments aren’t balanced; they have at least three different registers: bass, middle, and treble. And they are different; the bass is much more translucent, much more transparent, because the bass strings aren’t as thick and powerful as on a Steinway. And let’s not forget that all these earlier composers didn’t compose for the modern Steinway. They had this sound aesthetic of registers.

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