Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Yuja Wang and the San Francisco Orchestra!

Yes, in retrospect, I should have purchased a tuning hammer. I took the piano technology course at Oberlin (Conservatory) but dropped out when I ruined a hammer.

No, THAT is not OK; from the sound of it only the Litolff Scherzo was missing. What would you have them do, calculate how many minutes of the program were missing and pro-rate the refund based on that?

My goodness, accidents happen, and if we cry about having to be reimbursed for every little mishap in life we are just showing how self-centered and selfish we become.

Get over it!

Regards,

Most concerts are sold with programs subject to change.



The tool or the part of the piano?

Definitely!

And if they play an encore, charge the audience pro rata for the amount of time the encore lasted, which is only fair.

I remember my first concert at the BBC Proms, where Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Mahler's Symphony No.5, followed by Brendel playing Brahms's second concerto - nearly two hours' music for about $5. And then they played the William Tell Overture as an encore - twelve minutes's extra music.

I almost expected a German in tails to stand stiffly at the door, collection box in hand, to extract a few extra pennies from the audience as they filed out happily, but luckily, those Berliners (and their Italian chief conductor) were a generous lot.....

Wow, how can I get behind the stage at Davies lol. I'd really like to see their organ, actually.

Maybe from Pro Piano. Ms. Wang is listed as client on their website.

Wow, I didn't even know that place existed in SF

It's happened before, and he just went back to performing one of the most electrifying recordings of Rachmaninoff's 2nd sonata, ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaLkpDrdifc

Here is a report/review , including a picture of the attempt to replace the string. For some reason, it was taking too long, it seems.

By the way, although the reviewer says that Litloff Scherzo is the only thing remembered by that composer, four of the concertos symphoniques are recorded (on Hyperion) and are interesting to hear. When I last listened to them, one of them seems to be particularly outstanding and worthy of revival.

I've always LOVED that moment.

It looks like the string that broke was a tenor string under the bass strings. Those are the most difficult to replace. Fortunately, those are also the least likely to break.

I can verify that it wasn't a copper-wound string. The guy standing next to me requested the string as a souvenir of his first time at the SF symphony.

That is according to my memory of the event lol

No, the strings under the bass strings are usually plain wire. Was it really long, like about 4-5 feet up and back?

It didn't seem that long to me, but it might have been just a piece of the string.

When Yuja reached into the piano during her performance, she reached in with her right hand over by the treble. My feeling was that the string was a treble string, but from the picture it does seem like the technician is looking in the tenor section.

Maybe there was more than one problem with the piano? I didn't think it would take too long to just replace a string....

Why not just have another piano ready, like Liszt did in the movie Song of Love?

Replaced strings don't really hold their tune until after a few tunings. It would be hard to perform on a newly replaced string.

As I said before, the amount that a new string goes out in the first few hours after replacement is negligible. I try to make certain that any string which is about to break breaks while I am tuning it, rather than in the middle of the show, so I have a fair amount of experience with the issue. Most pianists have played on pianos that are a lot further out of tune than the amount one string will go during the two or so hours after being replaced, which is the amount of time between the last opportunity to tune the new string and the end of the performance.

That is a good idea