Piano Envy

This is the Bösendorfer Model 290 Imperial Grand piano, also known as The Most Fabulous Object in the World.  Asking price = $200,000.  As much as a middle-class home.  It also boasts 9 extra sub-bass half steps (a sixth) at the end of the lower register, so it has 97 keys total where normal grand pianos have a meager 88.

If you've ever played a Bösendorfer, you'll fondly remember its clear, rich, resonant voice, its weighty action, its gently modulating high notes, its powerful, harmonic low notes.  You'll remember feeling like a total rookie playing for the first time upon its magnificent keys, after years of practicing on wimpy American uprights or lame Steinways.  Yes!  Steinways are lame!

However.  I once had the opportunity to dance across the keys of a Fazioli grand piano.  And let me tell you...  Not even Bösendorfer can touch it.  Where Bösendorfer pianos are heavy, heady and rich, like the smell of dewy gardenias on a humid summer morning, Faziolis are their light lyric counterparts, analogous perhaps to the exquisite, subtle scent of a newly-opened orchid on a cool spring zephyr - one feels as if one half-imagined or dreamed the experience.  I WIN AT FLORID LANGUAGE.  Fazioli's premier piano, the M. Liminal (shown above) retails at around $589,000 and is the most expensive piano in the world.

Anyway, back to Bösendorfer.  On Friday evening, Caspian and I went over to Ruggero Piano for April's Fourth Friday concert, featuring several musicians.  But!  The pianist of the evening played a Rachmaninoff prelude, Debussy's Cathedrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral), and Ravel's Scarbo (THE most difficult piece of music ever written for piano [standard repertoire], but not particularly inspiring in my humble opinion) upon the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand.  We sat right beside the blazing piano, blasted by the full force of the 9'6" instrument played at maximum volume and ultimate depth.  It was pretty amazing, especially the Rachmaninoff and the Debussy.

I've been thinking about Debussy.  Contrary to popular belief, he was an anti-Romantic musician - actually the first of the Impressionists.  I am in love with every single one of his pieces.  Clair de lune, anyone?  Ah, that song.  It's like...  Like a genius's description of the act of observing some sort of god or angel or force of nature, powerful and gentle beyond imagining, reveling with elegant whimsy in its own power.

Ravel, on the other hand...  Maybe I'm just not capable of appreciating his music.  Maybe I'm too ignorant, or too organized or not organized enough or something.  His music is very technical, but it lacks the sort of casual, unselfconscious spontaneity that I connect with so well in Debussy's music.  And the fact that he wrote Scarbo in order TO compose the most difficult piano piece ever written defeats the purpose of composing music, kind of.

Hm.  One should never be ashamed of or criticise oneself for feeling like a simple major third, a single glowing interval, or a sparkling F#.  So many of the remarkably intelligent and astute people around me place so much pride in their complexity.  I think they must have a complex.  ::smirk::