It is Gerhartz's job to steer a pianist in the direction of the right instrument. Unthinkable!"Īnd then each piano has its own personality, which gradually emerges in the first year or two of its performing life. But if you gave a piano like that to Alfred Brendel, it would be unplayable for him. He could control it and he created his colours with it. "Horowitz made an amazing sound with a very, very light, shallow keyboard with a very, very, very bright tone. Gerhartz is sometimes asked to set up a piano just as the Kiev-born maestro preferred it - in the delusional belief that it'll make someone sound like him. The lightest touch of them all, although obviously before Gerhartz's time, was Vladimir Horowitz. "The keyboard I prepared for Mitsuko would probably be slightly too light for Imogen, so Imogen would find it hard to control." Do preferences divide up on gender lines? "You could say a female pianist would like a lighter piano, although not all of them," says Gerhartz. Some pianists like the piano to be set up so that all they have to do is tickle the key and a note sounds. ![]() That has a big impact on the depth of touch - how far you push the key down in order to get the hammer to the string."ĭepth of touch is all-important. "The hammer has a certain distance to accelerate before it hits. "It's a blow gauge," he says, of this instrument designed to read the distance between hammer and string. I watch as he picks up, for the umpteen-thousandth time in his 20-year career, a short stick and begins to take measurements from inside the piano. Unsurprisingly, Gerhartz, who trained at Steinway's Hamburg factory, comes across as highly meticulous and methodical. When he finds something, he takes a stick of chalk - which has its own smart golden holder - and deftly marks the wood above the offending key. Anyone else would be doing this to hone technique. His fingers trickle neurotically up and down the keyboard playing chromatic scales. There is regulating, voicing and balancing between bass and treble to do. This is why, when Gerhartz gets under the bonnet of a piano, he might not come up for air for an hour and a half. Every note has to pull its weight, every hammer, every string, every key. Preparing a concert grand for performance is quite a task. Somehow, no one noticed that the new piano was pitched at 440 while the orchestra, for some reason, played at 444. The Proms schedule is so tight that the windows for technicians are tiny. The Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy once requested a last-minute change of Steinway for a Prom. There is one horror story (from before Gerhartz's time, he quickly says). US orchestras specifically request a pitch of 440Hz for an A, while European ones generally go for 441. ![]() And tuning is not nearly as simple as it sounds. Gerhartz, Steinway's director of concert and artist services, is a master piano-tuner, maybe even a maestro. To call this man a piano-tuner would be to sell him a tad short. From his array of little instruments balanced on the strip of wood above the keyboard, Gerhartz chooses a small screwdriver-shaped device, attached to what looks like a hypodermic dart, and starts pricking the felt of the F sharp hammer nose once, twice, several times. You apply it right on the nose of the hammer and it stretches the felt, so it makes it slightly harder and gives it a bit more tension." This gives the note more attack and brightness - but the process is not yet finished. "So I used a mixture of collodium and ether to bring the note out. "There was one note here, an F sharp, that wasn't bright enough," he says. With the other, he is brushing a clear liquid on to its green felt coating. With one hand, Gerhartz has isolated a particular hammer. And in the last few weeks at the Barbican, this discreet figure in artisan fatigues has worked with Mitsuko Uchida, Evgeny Kissin, Imogen Cooper, Murray Perahia and Maria João Pires.īut back to the innards. When Lang Lang lands in London in April and needs his Steinway set up to extract his trademark maximum-impact sound, who's he going to call? You guessed it. When Alfred Brendel went on his farewell tour last year, he took Gerhartz with him. Stored in his mobile phone, he has the numbers of just about every top piano player on the planet. He's just back from Melbourne, where he set up two concert grands in a new venue. In an all but invisible way, Gerhartz is probably the single most important figure in the entire piano world, at least to pianists and to concert halls.
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