The new selection center in Wiener Neustadt Austria opened with a performance by Paul Badura-Skoda

Click here for a great Slate article, make sure you read to the end.

NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) is the big musical instrument industry trade show. Technically it’s held twice a year, but the big show is every January in Anaheim, California. Anybody and everybody connected with the musical products industry shows and attends NAMM. This includes pianos of all price points, drums, brass and wind instruments, guitar picks, amps, guitars, disco fog machines, makers of fine hand crafted conducting batons and everything, I mean everything in between. It’s a huge show and the Anaheim Convention Center is one of the only convention centers in the country that can hold it. NAMM is not a consumer show.  Manufacturers display their products and sell them to retailers, who will later sell them to consumers. Therefore it is a wholesale show, not open to the public. Thank god, because it is busy and crazy enough as it is. That being said, there are always

Bosendorfer, in the past, has used NAMM to show some beautiful examples of our cabinet design skills and veneer work. However with business being slow and space smaller, it made more sense to show instruments that have more immediate sales potential. This year we displayed a model 290 Imperial with the CEUS reproducing system, a model 200 Johann Strauss, a model 214 in Jactoba (ya-TOE-ba) and a new example of the CS series. All these pianos, with the exception of the 290, were sold to dealers during the show. The 290 CEUS is going to North Carolina to (hopefully) be used in a recording project that will be discussed later. Our new display room in the Marriott was small, with thick carpet and pipe and drape on the walls, resulting in a very acoustically “dry” room. At first it seemed to be  negative, since good piano sound usually means echo

So now you have a major Japanese piano maker with a proven high end approach owning and taking marketing and sales responsibility for a 180 year old Austrian maker of what is generally referred to as one of the worlds finest craft built pianos; what happens next? My prediction is that good things will come out of this for both companies but the road will not be pot hole free. 1. Yamaha understands the high end piano world. Yamaha has beaten their collective heads against the entrenched  base, prejudices and the occasionally less than honorable marketing techniques of the current industry monopolist and they are deeply aware of the sensitivity that surrounds the Bosendorfer brand identity. They have repeatedly stated that they plan no changes in Bosendorfer manufacturing and but will have to take some steps to ensure the continued viability of Bosendorfer as a semi-independent entity. Yamaha also understands,

The word from Vienna is that my pal Gabriela Montero (yes, she played at the inauguration) just had a big success in Vienna, playing Brahms 1 on a Bosendorfer 290 with the Vienna Philharmonic. Gabby is the real deal and if you don’t know of her, you should.  Sublime musical intelligence, warm personality, beautiful, huge sound with the added twist of being a skilled and natural improvisationist (is that a word?). This is improvisation in the classical sense, the ability to take a theme and spontaneously turn it into a polished performance. These were considered common skills for performers 100 (maybe 150) years ago but they have since disappeared from the scene. Properly done it is more than a parlor trick. There should be  all the structure of the sonata allegro form, including a development of the theme, often with variations as well as a recapitulation and coda. The idea

There was some recent news that seems to be universally misunderstood. The Bosendorfer factory in Wiener Neustadt is NOT moving. However, our administrative offices, currently on Graf Starhemberggasse in Vienna ARE moving to the factory in Wiener Neustadt. The Graf Starhemberggasse facility used to the be the factory but now is mostly empty. The consolidation of space makes perfect business sense. The Salon on Bosendorferstrasse, in the back of the Musikverien will remain our primary presence in Vienna.

Heresy I know but I wouldn’t have even thought about it unless I saw it. A very good FOB (friend of Bosendorfer) donated a model 225 to an important music department in the Midwest. However he specified that instead of black it be polished pyramid mahogany. As you can see this finish is beautiful and dramatic and quite different from the plain satin black most people are used to.  Now this is just my opinion and I am very very biased but I thought that mahogany piano on that stage was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen! It was so unexpected but fit so well, it had to be right!! What do you think?

Saw a model 200, about 30+ years old, rebuilt by a reputable shop. The original Schwander action had new Renner whippens. The hammers were Renner blues, the bass strings probably Mapes.  While overall the work was of reputable quality, it was a long way from Bosendorfer and had this strange burnt orange, thick lumpy finish on the plate. The real question is, what is it? I would argue that it is not a Bosendorfer anymore since so many of the parts were not original. This flies in the face of common rebuilder philosphy, at least here in the US. This approach comes from the experience with American Steinway which says that a good rebuilder can actually make a piano BETTER than the original. The issue is that assumptions made about one make of piano do not translate directly to another and most of the tweaks that people would take for

I’m a big fan of Schiff. Terrifically thoughtful and sensitive pianist with very clear ideas of what he is looking for. Can’t really argue with that. AND, he stays away from all the big barn burner Romantic warhorses. Thank you…no really, thank you. Andras and I used to be friendly a while ago (well, about 25 years ago) when I was a technician preparing a number of concert pianos for him.I got a chance to see up close his very individual approach to interpretation.  As are most musicians at this level, he was warm and funny as heck.