September 3, 2006 LA Times
Pulling strings to get it right
When the stakes are high but the instrument's an unknown, many pianists insist
on the technician they trust to put a performance in its best light.
By Constance Meyer, Special to The Times
UNTIL just recently, a violin soloist took for granted that she could carry her
fiddle with her on an airplane. A concert cellist was able to buy a seat for his
instrument whenever he flew. But even before heightened airline security,
concert pianists were not so lucky: Almost all of them must leave their
humongous, beloved instrument at home and make do with one they've quite likely
never played before.
To ease their discomfort, however, these musicians have an indispensable ally,
the unsung hero or heroine of many a concert and recital ? the piano technician.
That's the person at each venue who prepares the piano in every respect, doing
whatever possible to make a soloist feel at home when he or she sits down to
perform. Ron Elliott is going into his 20th year as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's
piano technician, handling all nine of its Steinway concert pianos at the
Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall. And as he puts it: "I am on standby
for all soloists until they're finished."
Obviously, we're talking here about more than your garden-variety piano tuner.
Piano technician Gordon McNelly is retail service manager at Steinway & Sons in
New York, where he oversees 12 other technicians. And according to McNelly, a
piano tuner "just tunes. He doesn't get into the subtleties, adjusting little
nuances of making that piano what the instrumentalist needs." Gerhard Feldmann,
president of Bösendorfer New York, the only exclusive showroom for Bösendorfer
pianos outside Vienna, likens a tuner to someone in the car business who "works
at Jiffy Lube and just knows how to change the oil ? as opposed to a Mercedes-Benz
technician, who knows how to maintain and service the entire vehicle."
To most people, in other words, the piano may be just a parlor instrument. But,
says Elliott, a concert pianist is like "a race car driver who takes it around
that track, and his life depends on it. It has to be able to perform."
*
Multipronged approach
IN fact, as Elliott explains, there are three distinct steps in piano care that
come before tuning, which consists basically of adjusting the tension in the
instrument's 200-plus strings so they vibrate with the correct frequency, or
pitch. He calls that "the icing on the cake."
The first step involves the piano's "action." "The instrument consists of a box
that has wood, steel and strings strung on it," Elliott says, "and the action,
which slides out of the piano like a big drawer with perhaps 4,500 moving parts
in it. The action is everything in between pressing the key down and the sound
coming out of the instrument. I have to assess what has to be done to get that
end product tone." McNelly likens the action, which determines how hard the
hammers hit the strings, to "the engine of the instrument. That key, when you
push it down, has to have a specified amount of resistance. It can't be too much
or too little."
The next phase of maintaining a healthy piano is tone regulation, when the
technician "goes through the piano chromatically to make sure that every note
sounds even, that one is not sticking out more than any other," McNelly says.
And finally, there is voicing ? setting the instrument's tone, usually by
modifying the hammers or the felt that covers them. When Feldmann prepares a
piano for an artist, his first question is, "What is the program? Brahms?
Debussy? Both?" "You can't voice the piano for every piece," he says, "but if I
know what is being played and who is playing, I have a rough idea. You want to
see how they attack, how they hold their fingers, to get an idea how to work on
the instrument for them." McNelly adds: "Every instrument has its own voice. The
ability to change that speaking voice falls to the piano technician. If the
piano is used for accompaniment, you don't want it to overpower, be too harsh or
too bright, so voicing would be the process of backing it off, making it a
little more mellow."
Each of these steps demands intuition, experience and technical expertise,
whereas many piano tuners nowadays rely on digital tuning devices. But on that
subject, McNelly is unequivocal. "I don't employ technicians who use them," he
says. "Besides tuning, you're listening for clicks, things that need to be fixed.
Relying visually on a digital device does not allow your ears to pick up the
nuances of this acoustic instrument. Once you set that piece of electronic
equipment on top of the piano, you lose credibility."
Elliott remembers working in New York in the '80s and frequently going to
Carnegie Hall "10 minutes before a performance ? the audience is seated and the
piano sounds terrible. It's survival. You can only rely on your brain and your
ear. You have to go through it as quickly as possible, bring the thing together
to be usable. And it's not possible with a machine. Every piano's not the same.
To make it sound beautiful and resonant, you don't take the same approach."
"The sad truth," says McNelly, "is that the industry is horribly unregulated.
Anyone can open a business and work on pianos. There's no licensing, no
certification, no union, no anything. You don't even need to be insured. Even
the used car business has regulations now. I don't know of any other industry
like this. Maybe bowling ball drillers. It's pretty bad."
*
A passion for the piano
HENRY STEINWAY, 91, great-grandson of the founder of Steinway & Sons, still goes
to work most days at the firm's West 57th Street headquarters in Manhattan.
Seated behind his desk one afternoon last spring, he observed that piano
technicians are "very interesting people." Standing amid her vast collection of
music boxes with her two Pyrenees mountain dogs nearby, Tali Mahanor, considered
one of the New York area's finest piano technicians, puts it somewhat
differently. "We're a weird and odd lot," she says with a laugh.
Today, Mahanor has her own business, called Cantabile Piano Arts, in Yonkers, N.Y.
But she says she was "around 12 when I acquired my first piano, for $25 ? it had
one ivory on the keyboard" ? and she recalls the first time it was tuned as a
well-nigh transcendent experience. There was "a purity, a beauty in that
gorgeous clear sound of a tuned piano. I was in tears pretty much that day. But
of course it eventually started losing that beauty, like windows that become
dirty again."
Mahanor's parents couldn't hear the difference, though, and refused to pay to
have the instrument retuned, "so I took a wrench and deliberately put it way out
of tune." After that, "I don't know how she found it, but my mother actually
bought me a home study course from the American School of Piano Tuning, which is
now online. There were 10 lessons and a little test at the end of each one. I
was in seventh grade when I made the decision that this was what I wanted to do.
By the time I reached high school, I had piano tunings every day after school."
When she was a junior, Mahanor went to Steinway & Sons in New York to talk about
job opportunities. "I passed the tuning audition," she says, "and it was
arranged that I would work there when I completed a one-year program in Sioux
City, Iowa, which I wanted to attend. It closed up a few years ago. It was a
dying art back then."
Elliott, for his part, started out to be a pianist before learning the craft of
tuning and taking a job in the concert department at Steinway in New York. After
several years, he came west and ran the Steinway concert/artist department at
Sherman Clay in Los Angeles for a short time, then went to work for the
Philharmonic. But even he acknowledges that to be a first-rate piano technician,
you need something beyond the physical and aural skills. You need an
understanding of emotional fragility.
"One of the things about doing standby ? it's not just in case something happens,"
he says. Pianists "feel more confident if I'm there. A lot of it is
psychological." Feldmann agrees, noting that "sometimes these artists, who go
all over the world, like to see a familiar face. The piano may have been
neglected, but when they know that you're coming, they know that you will do
whatever it takes to make this thing play well and make their work easier."
Feldmann says he enjoys being at concerts but also finds them "nerve-racking,
because you're always listening. Did something slip or is something going out of
tune? The greatest concert is when someone plays a heavy two-hour program and at
the end you still don't hear any out-of-tune notes on the piano. That's the
ultimate as a piano technician."
Certainly the prospect of fame is not a motivator for these dedicated
individuals. Yet they sometimes receive their due. "Years ago," Elliott recalls,
"during a televised concert of a piano concerto at the Bowl, a string broke, hit
the inside of the lid, rattled the strings, fell on the sound board and
continued to rattle."
The conductor signaled him, and the broadcast announcer gave a blow-by-blow
description: " 'Here comes Ron Elliott?.' I looked in and pulled the string out."
Then, his accustomed anonymity gone, Elliott was astounded to find 18,000 people
applauding. "The pianist got up, shook my hand and bowed."