Concert tuning

It is the annual week-long chamber music festival, for which our parish is the venue. Most years they don’t use a piano, but this time they are. It is our beloved Steinway Model L six-foot grand, the one the rebuilder once said was “unsuitable for serious work.” Last night it was on stage for a professional concert.

When I worked as a piano technician, I tuned spinets and old uprights. It was a rural area and few people had much money; none of them had high-end grand pianos. The best piano I serviced in those days was a Wurlitzer baby grand; a few of the older uprights were good, as well. But no concert tunings, other than preparing the church's upright for a couple of recitals of my own.

In a sense the concert tuning started two weeks ago. The piano had gone sharp with the damp weather, so I brought it back down to A=440, retuned it from its slightly unequal temperament to Equal Temperament just like they taught me in school, and spent several hours doing a careful job, knowing that I would nonetheless have to come back to it. I had to rush the tuning of the bottom octaves because of an impending evening church service, but I felt good about the rest of the piano.

A fortnight passed. This past Sunday afternoon, I tuned it again. It is much easier to work with a piano that is already at pitch and basically in tune, but I still spent an hour or so on it, this time devoting the patient care to the low end that it deserves. As is my custom, I finished with end-to-end slow arpeggios to enjoy the beautiful sound, stopping to improve a few notes. This is a really good piano, in a good acoustic.

Tuesday morning before the players arrived, I checked it again. I had expected to need only a few minutes; it took about an hour, getting the high treble right and cleaning up unisons here and there. Again, the slow arpeggios. I love this piano, and this room.

Wednesday morning, after it had done a hard day’s work on Tuesday: another touch-up, this time just a few unisons, fifteen or twenty minutes. Wednesday afternoon in the brief interval between their rehearsal and the evening Eucharist, with concert on its heels: a final check. Three unisons were slightly off, and the highest G needed retuning; I had left it a little flat. The old piano was ready for showtime, maybe the best she has ever sounded. I closed the lid, gave it a caress and said “play well.”

It did: a Shostakovich piano trio that pushed the piano to its limits, the other instruments as well. As someone commented afterwards, “it felt like the room was shaking.”

Thursday morning: another touch-up before the players arrive, with another concert tonight that includes the Franck violin sonata. Again, the work was simply the cleaning up of a few unisons, about twenty minutes. I was pleased that the tuning held up so well after the pounding it received last night.

When the paths of Piano Technician and Church Musician diverged in my late twenties, I took the other path, away from professional piano work. It surprises me that here, almost at the end of my musical career, a Concert Tuning has come my way.

Sitting in the audience for the concert, it was like having a student on stage. I was attentive to the clear high octaves in the Shostakovich, listening for unisons or “off” notes, happy when the piano sounded so well, delighted with how well she performed.

It was, of course, not just the piano who played well. Dominic Cheli was the guest artist; here is his website, where one can find recordings of his work, including his two commercial CDs. He is a fine young pianist, winner of the 2017 Concert Artists Guild competition. In light of my current topic, this quote from one of his reviews is appropriate: “Mr. Cheli’s performance of Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto ‘roared like a locomotive, shot firebrands of energy this way and that, while the piano strained to keep in one piece under the thrall of Cheli’s glorious technique.’”

Wednesday night’s Shostakovich was cut from the same cloth, and our old piano took it all in stride. I am so proud of her.