Steingraeber is found in the bustling city of Bayreuth, which wears its illustrious musical heritage (both Wagner and Liszt are buried there) lightly.

Unlike some European makers, it’s hard to miss Steingraeber, being just off Steingraeber Passage.

Let’s see, isn’t there a piano company around here someplace?

My street cred must be higher, and my timing was right because this time Udo Steingraeber took me around. You cannot imagine a more involved, knowledgable, enthusiastic proponent for the world of high end pianos and his in particular.

The Steingraeber factory also exudes history, being in continuous use for, well I forget the exact number, but a number of years.

Steingraeber places GREAT emphasis on the perfect mating between inner and outer rim. They go so far as to create the outer rim, using the exact inner rim that will be on the same piano, as a mold. Here 2 inner and outer rims are being created at the same time, numbered and matched forever.

There is a vast array of construction and design details that go into a Steingraeber and many of them have been adapted, modified, or dropped in recent history. This is an active, living breathing maker, not content to build historical artifacts. Here I must add that I found this trait in all the makers I visited, but Steingraeber is particularly active offering carbon fiber soundboards and the new phoenix bridge.

This piano has both

Tampa Bay Bridge

Fall means catching up on some travel and I headed south to the Orlando area and Naples. I flew into and out of Orlando, driving down to Naples and back. This is a bit of a drive but I had a pretty nice car due to an upgrade from Hertz.

I visited my dealer who also handles Steingraeber and saw my first Steingraeber carbon fiber soundboard. The idea here is NOT that carbon fiber works as well as wood. I heard it and it doesn’t. The point is that this allows high quality pianos to be installed in hostile (at least to pianos) environments that would ordinarily eat soundboards for lunch. My understanding is the the Moscow Conservatory owns a couple of these and that makes sense. Harsh climate, long cold winters, old facilities with no chance of adding enough humidity to the bone dry winters. This board sounds reasonable enough over most of the expanse of the keyboard. The tone is a little off but the sustain is good and the action of course feels completely normal.
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I’m a fan of trying something new and this is a great way of addressing one of the biggest traditional problems in the piano world; low humidity. That it comes from such a small, old world maker as Steingraeber is great. As you will see in a later post, soundboards are not the only thing Steingraeber is experimenting with.

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Carbon Fiber Soundboard

Just got back from a quick tour of 3 German manufacturers; Bluthner, Steingraeber and Schimmel. I’ve been wanting to visit these makers (and others) and took advantage of my son’s school break and a (relatively) cheap fare from Delta to fly from JFK to Berlin, rent a car, and spend 4 days driving through cold, damp, gloomy northern Europe.

We spent Tuesday morning doing a driving tour of Berlin before driving to Leipzig. Berlin is a fascinating city due primarily to its history, not its current incarnation. While it certainly has its sights, it has more than its share of drab, built-in-a-hurry, post war architecture. I did show my son the wall, drive through the former East part and have a lunch of a Donner. Then on to the autobahn for the 2 hour drive to Leipzig, where we stayed the first night in a typical, small, hotel-restaurant and slept the sleep of the dead.