This Yamaha C3, serial no. 1733733, was made in 1973 in Japan. It found its way to France, where it was played by a young pianist who came to Point CounterPoint music camp in Leicester, not far from Salisbury village. He so loved his experience there that his family donated their piano to the camp, who so loved the piano that they selected it to be their concert instrument housed at the Salisbury church. So it’s crossed both of the planet’s major oceans—ironically for this project, not the greenest provenance, but at least it went by ship instead of by plane. (Teaser: in Plymouth, in September 2024, I’ll be playing on the first piano to have traveled by air, so they say, a hundred years earlier.)
People often ask what it the best piano I’ve encountered on this tour. I want to be diplomatic, of course, but more fundamentally, piano quality can’t be capture on a linear scale. Different pianos are ideal for different kinds of music. Also, a piano may have a magnificent sound but non-optimal regulation, or phenomenal regulation but an unremarkable sound.
But like love…sometimes you just know it when you see it (or hear it and feel it). Everything I just wrote about the incomparability of different pianos is still true, but if I had to name a best Play Every Town piano so far, this would be it. Or at least, this was the best overall piano/space/acoustics situation.
This surprised me a little, because the C3 is barely over six feet. It’s not that you need more sound: in fact, part of the problem with high-quality (and therefore usually large-ish) grand pianos in old churches is that they are too powerful for the space, which though it might be big, is usually also highly resonant, as these churches were built for sometimes all-day sermonizing in the days before amplification. Rather, it’s that the size of the piano is the limiting factor for the length of the bass strings; the shorter the string, the more heavily wound it must be in order to produce the necessary low frequencies; and the heavier the string, the less clear and “true” the lowest bass notes tend to sound. But somehow or another, this medium-sized Yamaha had both sweetness in the upper registers and clarity in the bass, all of it controlled by a superbly even and responsive action.
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