| Ballade
for a Piano: Grotrian Steinweg 21504 Page 2 of 4 II. The Piano Itself Subjective description: Compared to modern Steinways, noted for the brilliance of their sound, GS 21504 was mellow, bordering on the muted, especially in the bass. Still, the piano had its own distinctive timbre, a voice perhaps like that of a rich contralto. The action, while heavy, was responsive to the player with the muscles to manage it. To play GS 21504 was to be transported back in time. This after all was pure 19th-century technology, the best that era had to offer. Making music with it, one easily imagined one was in a Berlin or Vienna or Paris salon, with perhaps the Schumanns, or Liszt, or Brahms, or Mendelssohn in attendance (such are the fantasies of the amateur pianist). 1998 and the empty-nest syndrome led to the decision to change to a smaller house and pass the piano on to older son Andy, now a composer and one-half of "tomandandy," in New York. He had a need and a place (a house in East Hampton) for it. Perhaps the piano could do with a makeover before moving north? Consultation with technician Patrick Baum yielded the surprising information that two of the best piano restorers in America lived and worked in Pasadena, Texas. Pasadena, Texas, for those not familiar with it, is a large working-class, oil-refinery suburb of Houston. The city had its fifteen seconds of fame a couple of decades ago in the John Travolta movie, Urban Cowboy, for Pasadena was the site of Mickey Gilley’s eponymous country-music club. With the oil bust in the 1980s, Gilley’s closed and Pasadena went back to its normal self, acres of post-World War II asbestos-shingled tract houses feeding the employment needs of the largest concentration of oil refineries in the world. And there, we learned, dwelled Ronald and Merle Sanford, piano restorers extraordinaire. |