Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Do Hamburg D's usually sound this gorgeous? Man!

https://soundcloud.com/user1292364/9-track-09
Here is one that I take care of.

Lovely performance and piano. But I don't know if a NY Steinway would sound any different in the same music.

This is a beautiful performance. Thanks for sharing.

Despite growing up in Asia, being an amateur myself I had no real experience ever playing on a Hamburg D. Many recordings I listened to back then were made by European labels (Decca, DG) for Europe-based Steinway Artists (Ashkenazy, Argerich, etc.) so I assumed those were done using Hamburg Steinways. While those artists' performances were truly inspiring to me, I always found the sound more metallic than, say, recordings from Horowitz or Van Cliburn. If there is such thing of my "overall" preference when it comes to Steinway, I may actually like the less metallic sound from New York make, despite I still mentally drooled over the reputedly higher finish/prep quality from the Hamburg factory.

With that said, the tonal quality of the piano used in this recording was simply amazing. A good friend of mine recently performed on a Hamburg D in his inaugural lecture-recital as an endowed professor at U. Tenn. and the timbre of that instrument was also as spectacular.

A few days ago I popped into our local Steinway showroom (too close to my home not to bug them once in a while). I tried the 5 B's they had, and while they were all different I didn't find any of them necessarily superior (a very subjective adjective) to the Model A we have at home. This showroom, except for their C&A section, typically does not stock new Ds on the showroom floor. On that day, however, they had one fairly new (SN: 601xxx) polished ebony model D there, NY-made of course. The owner of the store asked me to try it--my techniques were way out of shape right now, but that D was a totally different beast from all others there. Not because it was bigger and more powerful, as I was only playing some soft pieces, it just was so different that now I am entertaining the idea of seriously compromising the free space in our living room where our pianos sit.

Extremely metallic and thin, not warm and rich at all. I suppose maybe they needed the brightness for projection reasons but still.... I've started it right before Rach's Prelude in G minor, I think it sounded particularly harsh for that prelude. This is the video:

https://youtu.be/CfC1bzr5Ezc?t=28m5s

I think in order to really get a good view of the differences in the NY and Hamburg pianos it helps to have a little background about where each factory is coming from in tone. Here is an excerpt from an article that I wrote last year:

Ultimately, and on many levels, the subject of piano tone defies verbal description. In September, pianist and organist Danny Uhl, and I, visited Steinway’s New York factory to choose a Steinway D (9') concert grand for his home. His ultimate choice had a penetrating sound. Each note filled the air with a rich, ethereal quality, like a lavender infusion—or so we felt at the time. As a technician, I spend almost every day trying to translate such descriptions into mechanically useful terms.

German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway founded Steinway and Sons in New York City in 1853. In 1880, one of Henry Engelhard’s sons, C.F. Theodore Steinway, returned to Germany to open the Steinway factory in Hamburg. Today, the Hamburg factory is still owned by the New York–based American firm.

I am frequently asked to explain the differences between New York and Hamburg Steinways. There is no single, simple answer. There are 12,000 parts in a piano, and each has a small effect on the sound. No two pianos are identical in tone and touch—which is why the famous Steinway Concert and Artist bank of grands, in New York City, contains over 20 pianos waiting to be selected by pianists of all musical genres.

The historical differences between the pianos made at the two factories are much more striking than the current differences. While the instruments from both factories were initially designed to feel and sound the same, the results were often dissimilar, due to many factors: the distance between the factories, differing availabilities of materials, two world wars, and the manufacturing traditions and tonal aesthetics of two different cultures. Gradually, the Hamburg pianos acquired a slightly different tone and touch from their New York cousins. The greatest divergence of sound between instruments made by the two factories occurred in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

Complicating matters is that a pianist’s perception of an instrument’s tone quality often depends on its condition. As a result, pianists’ impressions of New York and Hamburg Steinways vary dramatically, depending on the pianos’ age and condition. When a fine piano suffers in tone, leaving it open to complaint, this is far more likely to be the result of a lack of technical attention than of any failure on the part of the manufacturer. When a fine piano is lauded as fabulous, it has usually been tuned and voiced quite recently.

In 1984, Steinway began a project to consolidate and standardize the manufacturing processes at the New York and Hamburg factories that is now virtually complete. The challenge has been to make small, incremental changes that do not affect the quality of the pianos made at either factory, taking the best of each tradition and combining them into a single consistent process.

Several months ago, a young pianist played a recital in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. She was intimately familiar with Hamburg Steinways—her family owns a Hamburg Steinway B (6' 11"), and she graduated from a university where she often played a Hamburg. After the concert, she enthusiastically told me about the gorgeous Hamburg Steinway D (8' 11") she’d played. It was a gorgeous instrument—but it was a New York Steinway. This confirmed for me what pianists are now experiencing among Steinways: the differences in culture between the two factories have been blurred—for the better.

Tonal aesthetics are much like the opinions of epicures. In the early days of New York Steinway, as American concert venues grew in size, the tonal goal became the “big orchestra piano,” with the focus on Steinway’s famous bell-like tone and huge projection—while the Hamburg pianos, which were still being played in mostly smaller, more acoustically favorable halls, concentrated on a pristine clarity with a variety of tonal elements.

The New York pianos were designed for evenness of timbre, carefully matched from bass to treble, for a huge sound that would cut through a 100-piece orchestra, to meet the challenge of filling a 3,000-seat auditorium. To achieve their bell like tone, the New York pianos were fitted with softer, more flexible, more resilient hammers for a stronger fundamental from the strings. By the late 19th century, New York Steinways were being shipped far and wide, their big sound coming more from the soundboard and rim. The Steinway hammers needed very little hardening, brightening up on their own through playing. As a result, by 1895, the sweet, clear sound of early New York Steinways was more easily maintained if the pianos were shipped from New York to, say, San Francisco with softer hammers.

Meanwhile, the Hamburg Steinways pianos were clinging to the concept of the piano being its own orchestra, with the expectation of gradually changing tonal color seamlessly moving across the keyboard with a clean crisp, clarity, distinctive in timbre several octaves apart. By the early 1950s, when piano manufacturing was returning to normal after World War II, the gulf between the tonal palettes of Hamburg and New York was widening. It is important to note that this difference was not just a difference between New York and Hamburg Steinways. This was a difference between the American sound and the European sound.

That gulf is audible in a 1949 recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto on a New York Steinway at the Hollywood Bowl. He artfully pushes the piano to its tonal and physical limits. Compare this with Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 on a Hamburg Steinway in 1961 by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who is absorbed in the minutiae of highlighting and contrasting each beautiful voice and line. The differences in the two pianists’ approaches not withstanding, the synergy between pianist and piano maker that has existed since Mozart and Johann Andreas Stein, that has shaped the direction of piano tone throughout the history of the piano, still continues today. Piano makers try to please pianists, but pianists also adapt and create within the scope of the sounds they are presented with by the piano.

The main historical differences in the sounds of New York and Hamburg Steinways were in the hammers and the approach to voicing. The New York hammer traditionally started out softer, but its sound was made brighter with the judicious use of a lacquer solution and heavy initial use. Repeated blows of hammer on string harden the hammer’s surface, gradually brightening the sound until it settles into the ideal tone. The advantage of beginning with a slightly softer hammer is that, when its tone stabilizes, it then requires much less voicing work than its denser, harder German counterpart, and can still be voiced down to a very mellow tone if desired.

The late 19th century Hamburg hammer started out the same consistency as the original New York hammer but became for many years after WWII a denser, harder hammer that was initially very bright but voiced by needling it to soften it down to the lush focused tone, - a completely opposite approach from New York.

In the last several years, with the standardization of manufacturing protocols, the New York hammers have been made of firmer, more elastic felt, and the Hamburg factory has been using hammers that are slightly softer. Now, the difference in hammer hardness between new instruments from the New York and Hamburg factories is negligible.

The voicers in New York and Hamburg still use different techniques, however, which result in slightly different sounds. In general, I find the New York hammers very malleable in tone. The Hamburg hammers have a classically clean European quality with a focused tonal target, meaning that there is a sweet spot where they sound the best, while the New York hammers still produce the great wash of sound that American pianists expect from New York Steinways. Many people remark that all New York Steinways sound different from each other. I think it is the malleability of their hammers that results in those differences. This latitude in voicing is also what makes the New York instruments so adaptable for concert use: broad changes can be made to accommodate the artist, the venue, and the repertoire.

Steinway’s specifications for the keys and actions of its New York and Hamburg instruments have also been standardized: the dimensions are now virtually the same, with only very small differences—so small that the action parts are interchangeable. Both factories now use the same keys, made at Kluge Klaviaturen a German company owned by Steinway. The New York factory makes maple actions that are especially stable for institutional situations with constantly changing temperature and humidity, such as the dreaded outdoor summer venue. The Hamburgs use action parts of hornbeam, the traditional German material, with slightly tighter tolerances that work very well in more controlled climates.

Both the New York and Hamburg actions have gotten much lighter over the last 10 years, due to some ingenious small changes in the action geometry and reductions in friction between parts. The really good news is that all of the new parts also fit older Steinways. If you have an old Steinway with a heavy action, the new parts can be an easy solution to the problem.

Although some of the recent changes appear on the surface to be simply cosmetic, I believe that they, too, can be more reasons the New York and Hamburg sounds have merged. Both New York and Hamburg now use a finish of highly polished polyester, although the old-style satin lacquer is still available from New York. Comparing higher-polish and satin-lacquer pianos, I do hear some additional boost in upper harmonics as it reflects off the harder polished finish, especially from the underside of the lid, which makes the sound a bit brighter. In addition, both the New York and Hamburg concert grands now have the larger brass German casters, which means these pianos can be moved without having to put them on a spider dolly. Rubber casters absorb sound; the brass concert casters make the sound more immediate.

In the past, the rim (casing) materials were a bit different. Hamburg used beech and mahogany, but has switched to the material used in New York: a hard-rock maple rim with a layer of mahogany between the inner and outer rims, which to my ear has improved the projection of sound. The cast-iron plates of all New York and Hamburg pianos are made in Steinway’s own facility in Springfield, Ohio. The scale designs and soundboards, species, country of origin, and supplier are the same.

Great story - thanks for sharing! From your experience is there a big difference between the A, B and D?

I think the bass of the B is still quite a distance from that of the D. The NY ones I have played were very "growly" and fuzzy. At my conservatory we had 2 B's in each professor's studios, as well as two D's in the recital hall. One of them is by general consensus clearly superior to the other, both in terms of touch and tone.

I nominate this as the post of the month.