Does anyone know the difference between pianos branded Steinway & Sons
and those branded only as Steinway (with a slightly different typeface)?
I remember that at the conservatory in Rome, the vast majority were of the first type
and there was one in a small room where I would occasionally retreat to study that only said Steinway.
This piano felt particularly favorable to me; it had a mechanical response that satisfied me greatly.
It made me feel particularly at ease, "easy and friendly" as I might comment... quite different from the
"Steinway and Sons" in the other rooms... one could unequivocally perceive the "key dip" unlike
the Steinway and Sons which always gave me a sensation of "rubbery" touch and poor mechanical
clarity...
Then, rewatching some videos of Glenn Gould, I realized that he used specifically this "Steinway" piano, to be exact the CD 318, and that he only wanted this one, detesting all the other S&S that the company offered him...
Look at this.... I think you have excellent taste!!
I went back to reread the story of Glenn Gould... and of his piano... it seems he had a morbid relationship with this instrument that he had found by chance in a warehouse where it had lain for years and which then accompanied him throughout his life; at one point during a transport, the piano suffered serious damage and Glenn ended up spending several thousand dollars of that time to have it repaired..
"The story of Gould and his piano has something deeply romantic about it. Gould discovered it in 1960, in the back of the Eaton’s Company concert hall, a large department store that also sold musical instruments, in downtown Toronto. The piano had been there for years, forgotten and abandoned after having had a good decade as an instrument for concerts by pianists passing through town. Gould saw it, lifted the fallboard, played a few passages quickly, standing up, with only one hand. He had on him that kind of carelessness of someone who tries but doesn't truly believe in it. In that brief passage, however, he understood that this was the piano he had been looking for his whole life: the Steinway CD 318.
The history of that piano is (obviously) singular. Produced in 1941, in the midst of the World War. Factories were being converted and Steinway was no exception. They produced gliders for airplanes and floors for helicopters; then, being a factory of highly specialized technicians and artisans, they stopped and began to produce coffins. The selected wood and all the perfection of the pianos were put at the service of the dying fallen in war. In between, when possible, a few pianos were made per year. The CD318 was one of them.
