(From the Honest Broker post from Ted Gioia)
Nils Frahm: Night
Late Night Piano Meditations Performed on the Klavins M450—a One-Ton Upright Piano
Ted Gioia
I really should tell you about the music, and not the piano. But I love the sound of this instrument.
That’s because it’s a special piano:
- For a start, it looks ridiculous. It’s 4.5 meters tall—by comparison the top of basketball backboard (backboard, not the rim) is less than 4 meters from the ground. So nobody can jump high enough to touch the top of this piano.
- The piano strings are three times as long as those in a Steinway upright and almost twice as long as those in a 9-foot grand.
- The weight is 980 kilograms. That’s more than twice as heavy as a 9-foot concert hall Steinway
- The pianist performs from a platform ten feet above the ground.
It looks like a circus act, except that there’s no net.
Maybe all that sounds like a stunt to you, but the sound of this instrument is a force of nature.
It’s the wind in the trees. A fox in the brush. A knot in the wood, The song of a thrush…and a few other things too.
When I first heard it, I wanted to own an instrument just like it. I started scheming.
But my floor would collapse from the weight. The structural engineer already warned me about all my books. So I will never have a Klavins 450 at my home.
[Sigh!]
But that doesn’t matter Because Nils Frahm shows what this instrument can do, and he doesn’t need any help from me—except maybe to spread the news.
This kind of piano invites a very different process of music-making andlistening. Just sit back and enjoy the resonance and slow decay of individual notes. There’s pathos in every phrase and harmonies float like aural clouds in a sunset sky.
I could imagine composers reinventing their sound palettes in order to take advantage of this new vista. I’d do it myself—if I could just find a way of getting this bad boy into my music room.