Bill Ballard takes a look at the Vermont Jazz Center’s new Steinway grand piano. Ballard, principal of William Ballard Piano Service, has been coddling pianos since he graduated from trade school in 1972 and says that there’s more to a piano than just harmonious sound, there is also the tone quality, the voice of the piano and whether it expresses dynamic range … whether it has “color.” Ballard will be tuning and taking care of the piano so that it continues to sing for many more years to come.
A Steinway piano for the Vermont Jazz Center
The Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro has presented concerts, hosted jam sessions, and run ensembles using the same sweet workhorse piano for the past 15 years. In that time, numerous world-class pianists such as Carolina Calvache, Cyrus Chestnut, Gerald Clayton, Armen Donelian, Taylor Eigsti, Don Friedman, Hal Galper, Robert Glasper, Jason Lindner, Harold Mabern, Luis Perdomo, and Edward Simon have shown that VJC’s Yamaha C7 piano can really sing.
But VJC Artistic Director Eugene Uman said he felt a quality of sound was missing at his venue, something richer and grander. And he said the absence stood out on recordings of concerts held at VJC.
Uman had longed to purchase a Steinway concert grand. And he put the word out that VJC was seriously interested in realizing its dream of providing pianists performing there a sleek and commanding Steinway Model D, a nine-foot concert piano.
Piano technician Crystal Fielding mentioned that the estate of John and Catherine Baird was selling a Steinway D in Montpelier. Uman was shown the piano by Catherine Baird’s sisters, Helen and Marjorie Merena, and said he was captivated by its majesty, resonant tone, rich bass, and overall playability.
Vermont musician Arthur Zorn says the D is an excellent addition to the VJC’s offerings: “This instrument ’sings’ from the lowest note to the top of the keyboard. When I play it, the piano encourages my fingers, hands, arms, and body to express music in a way that I have not experienced with any other instrument.”
The Merena sisters told Uman that the piano had been sold in 1998 to Baird by the esteemed classical pianist Lorin Hollander, who had performed “with virtually all of the major symphony orchestras in the United States and many around the world,” and whom New York Times critic Howard Klein touted as the leading pianist of his generation. Hollander told the Merenas that this was a piano worthy of the Steinway showroom’s “concert basement,” where “a special class — the top 1 percent — of hand-picked instruments were selected to be used exclusively by Steinway artists for recording and concertizing at places like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Alice Tully Hall.”
In a phone conversation with Uman, Hollander elaborated: “This one for me had that magical… what we all called the Rachmaninoff sound, where something happened that went beyond us. And sitting down at that piano — even before sitting down — you would get nervous. I would feel a type of anxiety deep in my muscles just approaching the instrument. I don’t know what’s real here. I’ve studied science and I know what is required to make a legitimate hypothesis of reality. However, I also live in the world of the unnamable, unmeasurable magic of great music. This piano had it.”
And so, thanks to the munificence of the McKenzie Family Charitable Trust, the Vermont Jazz Center in December 2015 finally landed the instrument of Uman’s dreams: a piano with enhanced nuance and greater dynamic range — one that truly complements the VJC’s mission of presenting top-level artists in an environment that maximizes the audience’s listening experience.
