How do you pick the perfect concert piano? Inside the Royal Conservatory’s $300,000 bet

The nightmare began two weeks before the unveiling.

Jim Anagnoson’s standard anxiety dream, in which he was onstage at the piano and realized the conductor was beating his baton to a piece Anagnoson didn’t play – that dream he knew. Most concert pianists had their own version of it. Anagnoson is dean of the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, not to mention half the two-piano duo Anagnoson & Kinton (40 years, 1,500 concerts, 10 recordings). He was no stranger to nerves before a performance.

But the new dream was weirdly specific.

Two months earlier, in September, Anagnoson and his boss, Dr. Peter Simon, former concert pianist-turned-CEO of the Conservatory, had flown across the ocean to London to choose a new Steinway concert grand piano for Koerner Hall, the Conservatory’s world-renowned recital space. The new piano would replace the showpiece that sat centre stage for 13 years and helped make Koerner Hall famous. Simon and Anagnoson had chosen the old piano, too.

Hardly anyone understood how daunting it was to choose a new concert grand. Most people thought all grand pianos were alike, but it wasn’t true: there were good pianos, and there were great pianos, and then there were a tiny handful of truly exceptional pianos. When you were spending a few hundred thousand dollars of a donor’s money on an instrument that was going to be played by the best and most demanding pianists in the world in front of thousands of paying customers, you wanted to make sure you found a piano no one else had.

Hence Anagnoson’s freaky new anxiety dream. In the fresh nightmare, as the new piano was being unveiled onstage on opening night, musicians got up in his face and screamed, “I can’t stand the treble on this piano!” The treble, no less, the upper register that in Anagnoson’s view most clearly defined a piano’s worth. “Who chose this thing?” they bellowed.

Open this photo in gallery:

But today, the dream would either fade away or become reality. On an afternoon in late November, the new Steinway grand, all three metres and 460 kilograms of it, was finally double-dollied off a cube van into Koerner Hall by three burly guys in their late fifties. Anagnoson was going to test it out.

The movers’ names were Chris, Billy and Wally. They did nothing but move pianos, eight to 10 a day. Pianos usually travel on their sides, to take up less room. But the new grand had been air-freighted flat, legs unattached, from the showroom in London at Steinway’s insistence (and an additional cost of $10,000) to protect its mirror-like diamond-gloss finish. The piano had languished for days in customs, in god-knows-what inhospitable temperature and humidity (both of which affect an instrument’s performance).

It now needed several days to acclimate to the concert hall, where it then had to be adjusted and finessed and tuned as many as half a dozen times before Monday. On that day, four days hence, the new grand piano would be played for the first time in public at a private onstage dinner for the Conservatory’s board and 50 of its most knowledgeable and wealthiest and judgiest patrons.

Time, in other words, was tight. A fine (though possibly humidifying) mist of anxiety hung in the air.

Open this photo in gallery:

The movers were certainly not in a hurry. Chris and Billy and Wally were unwrapping the piano so delicately they could have been defusing an atom bomb. They attached giant brass double casters to each of the piano’s three stout legs. I think we can all agree they are beautiful casters. They screwed in two of the legs, and very, very gently tipped $300,000 worth of precision percussion onto its side to attach the third leg. Then they tipped it back down to the floor.

Damon Groves, the Conservatory’s chief piano technician, sat down and opened the Steinway’s glistening lid. Groves was usually as calm as a set of instructions, but even he looked nervous.

He removed the glossy front panel of the piano, its fallboard, and extended his arms obstetrically into the instrument up to his elbows. He slid the keyboard and action out of the piano, cradling it like a Madonna holding the body of Jesus. He removed a strip of wood that had immobilized the piano’s felt hammers in transit. Whatever you do, you don’t want to screw up the hammers. He slipped the keyboard back into the keybed, replaced the fallboard.

Open this photo in gallery:

Open this photo in gallery:

The new Steinway grand, on which Anagnoson’s reputation would now depend, was ready for its test drive.

Anagnoson sat down on a stackable chair. There wasn’t even a piano bench. He planned to play the same standard passages he always played to test out a new piano: some Brahms, to assess its sonority and the character of its tone; a little Chopin étude, to reveal the different levels of its voicing; and the opening of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, just because it was his favourite, and also the first piece he had played on the old piano. He was not an unsuperstitious man.

He wanted it to be an exceptional piano. Who wouldn’t? The world was falling apart. No one knew what to believe and everyone was furious. It would be nice if the new piano made the kind of sound everyone was somehow longing to hear.

Open this photo in gallery:

In September in London, Steinway had prepped three Model Ds, its largest and most famous grand piano, for Simon and Anagnoson to consider. The two had jumped the line: these days, there’s a six-month wait for a Steinway. They were accompanied in London by Alex Thomson, the senior manager at Steinway in Toronto, and by their wives. Simon is married to Dianne Werner, a noted pianist and Grammy nominee and the third member of the piano selection squad. Julia Young, Anagnoson’s spouse, a Conservatory examiner and piano teacher at Havergal College, served as a fourth pair of reliable ears.

The plan was for each of them to play all three pianos, privately and in turn, and then compare notes. That way the only thing that swayed you was the piano’s sound. Anagnoson went first, Werner went second. When Werner emerged, she secretly flashed two fingers at Anagnoson, and he knew they were in agreement.

Simon went last. He was torn between Piano One and Piano Two. The third had too big a sound for solo performances in a hall as intimate as Koerner. Anagnoson suggested Simon play a very specific piece on both pianos: Morgen!, a highly-coloured love song Richard Strauss wrote for his wife that had a high note in its early bars, one that would reveal (or not) the piano’s singing treble. Simon went back in. The clouds parted: Piano No. 2 it was. The entire process took just over 90 minutes. Steinway tries to limit the decision period to three hours: after that, everyone’s too confused.

Open this photo in gallery:

“It’s such a game of chance,” Simon said. “You can say, well, they’re all manufactured the same, the parts are the same. And that’s all true. But they don’t sound the same. They don’t play the same, they don’t feel the same. And some are special.” Simon has spent 31 years transforming the Royal Conservatory from an impoverished colony of the University of Toronto’s music department into an independent and globally revered music school and performance space. He wasn’t about to settle for a less-than-exceptional instrument for its main stage.

“The No. 1 requirement is that the sound of a piano has the broadest possible range, the greatest colour, the greatest nuance. An artist works in sound; that’s all we have,” he said. ”You want an instrument that allows you to do everything you can dream of in terms of sound.” Or, to put it another way: “A lot of pianists expect that you will have a Hamburg Steinway there.”

Note that modifier: Hamburg. Therein lies one of a thousand stories about the history of the concert grand piano.

In 1853, Henry Engelhard Steinway emigrated from Germany to make pianos in Manhattan. By then he had already built about 400 in Hamburg. But pianos had become the hot new middle-class status symbol in North America: before cars came along, a piano was the biggest purchase a family would make, and its main form of home entertainment. There were more than 20 piano makers in pre-Depression Toronto alone.

As late as the 1950s, before television pushed classical music to the side as a pastime, the piano business was voraciously competitive: New York Steinways battled it out with Baldwins and many others in North America, while in Europe Bosendorfers and Bechsteins took on the Hamburg Steinways (the German branch of the family company incorporated 25 years after Henry moved to New York).

But the New York-based Steinway boys understood marketing like no one else. They ran their piano company the way Nike operates today: for decades they gave special treatment to well-known pianists who endorsed the Steinway grand (Franz Liszt, Arthur Rubinstein and Cole Porter among them). Nor was the company subtle about pressuring pianists to stay in the Steinway pen. According to A Romance on Three Legs, Katie Hafner’s deft book about Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s obsessively compulsive search for a piano he liked, when Rubinstein switched from a Steinway to a Mason & Hamlin piano in the 1920s, Steinway banned him from using Steinways for the rest of his tour. He was by no means the only exile.

To this day, the Steinway salesforce is famous for its disdain toward other less artisanal brands, such as Yamaha pianos, whose assembly is more mechanized – a perfectly fine concert grand piano, at a fraction of the price. Steinway insists the musical components that affect the sound of the 2,400 pianos it produces every year (all by request) are handmade. Their soundboards – the wooden diaphragm of the piano that amplifies its sound – aren’t just spruce from Sitka, Alaska. No, no, no. They’re Sitka spruce quarter-sawn from smaller trees on north-facing slopes that receive less sunlight and therefore grow more slowly and develop a more condensed grain, resulting in greater resonance and projection when the instrument is played. The rock maple that forms the many layers in the all-important curved rim is from Wisconsin, period.

Open this photo in gallery:

Today, Hamburg Steinways are sold mostly to Europe and Asia; New York supplies North and South America. New York Steinways (which, according to various sources, experienced production and quality challenges in the 1970s similar to those suffered by Detroit carmakers) are generally considered to have a “more powerful,” “darker,” sound, and a “more colourful” bass; the Hamburgs are described as having a “singing” treble and a “sweeter” and more “bell-like” quality. It’s hard to pinpoint why they sound different: the company has consolidated many of its manufacturing processes since it was purchased for $512-million and taken private in 2013 by billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson (the genius who made $4-billion shorting the subprime-mortgage market in 2008). “The pianos these days are 95 per cent the same piano,” Thomson, the Steinway sales manager, says. “But there are differences.” One pertains to the 88 hammers that strike the strings, whose felted wool is hot-pressed in Europe but cold-pressed in New York, resulting in a different density of sound and “voicing,” as pianists call it. In a concert grand, details are everything.

Not every concert pianist wants a Steinway, of course. Canada’s Angela Hewitt prefers a Fazioli (an Italian maker founded in 1981, renowned for its touch with early classical music): her own $194,000 model was destroyed two years ago when movers dropped it. Oscar Peterson preferred a Bosendorfer Imperial Grand in his house in Mississauga. Elton John is a Yamaha guy. In the 1980s, when Yamaha, traditionally the workhorse of the piano world, wanted to break into the concert-grand game, it offered to provide Anagnoson and Leslie Kinton with a pair of Yamahas wherever they played their two-piano concerts, in return for a mention in the program. But Steinway is king. Nearly 2,500 professional pianists, from Billy Joel to Diana Krall and Lang Lang, have chosen to be “Steinway artists” – at their own unpaid request, Steinway insists. For everyone else, Koerner Hall rents the grand piano the artist wants, and moves it in for their gig.

Choosing a top-flight piano, in other words, is a subjective, even romantic experience. The piano business? Not so much. Earlier this year, Paulson and Steinway Musical Instrument Holdings Inc. issued a preliminary prospectus to notify the world of their intention to take the firm public again. Some estimates suggest Paulson will at least double his investment. (In 2019, he sold half the company’s lot in Astoria, N.Y., to Robert de Niro’s production company for $73-million.) Judging from the prospectus, Steinway’s future rests heavily on two pillars.

The first is Spirio, the company’s new high-end player piano – a Steinway (anywhere from $150,000 to twice that amount) that can be played like a piano but also faithfully and wirelessly reproduce, like an exponentially sensitive player piano, with its keys moving up and down, any performance in the Spirio digital library. It can even transmit live performances being “Spirio-cast” from another Spirio Steinway. Yuja Wang can play in your living room without actually being in your living room. Annual Spirio sales have leapt from $33-million to $131-million in the past five years.

The other strut in Steinway’s future, according to the prospectus, is the luxury goods market in China, where the number of “ultra-high-net worth individuals” – assets of US$30-million or more – grew by 145 per cent between 2016 and 2021. Almost 35,000 pianos are sold every year in North America. In China, the number is 400,000, and 30 million kids take piano lessons.

Open this photo in gallery:

Monday morning, three days after the new piano’s arrival. The piano is now on stage at Koerner Hall. Groves is fine-tuning it for the inaugural performance this very evening.

Concert grands are tuned before every performance, but a virgin concert grand is a delicate and unpredictable flower. Groves spent part of the weekend subtly reseating a few treble strings to extend their sustain. “I’ve made a slight improvement to an already excellent piano,” he declares. He speaks quietly but alertly, as if potential pianistic catastrophe lurks around every corner, which it often does when you are responsible for keeping a Conservatory’s 100 perpetually pounded pianos in proper nick. “Any time you adjust the strings on a piano, you’re asking for short-term instability,” Groves admits. “So the piano can go way out of tune. I need a few times to tune it in order for me to trust the tuning stability again.” He has seven hours until showtime.

Groves’s grandmother wanted him to be a concert pianist, but by the time he graduated with a music degree from the University of Colorado he knew he liked building things more than performing, and enrolled in a piano technology program instead. There are theoretically as many as 20 overtones to a single note on a fine Steinway, of which most of us can hear six, at most. Groves and his assistant, Jessica Lombardi, talk about the deep complexities of tuning and voicing and harmonics and beats like 12th-century monastics discussing a new technique in alchemy.

Open this photo in gallery:

Groves (who, unlike the majority of workers who make Steinways, actually plays the piano) is thrilled with the new arrival. The existing piano, CD 585799 – he refuses to call it old – is still a fine instrument, and Koerner Hall plans to keep it around, as a backup. But it’s 13 years old (the standard stage life of a concert grand is a decade) and “it wasn’t as bright, it wasn’t projecting as much,” Groves admits. “And it definitely required more maintenance.” The decline was almost unnoticeable. But to artists like Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, who played a packed Koerner Hall recently, a 5-per-cent loss is a game-changer.

Groves doesn’t look much at the piano as he gently torques its tuning pins back and forth; he stares straight ahead, listening and thinking and making endless decisions. “We’re human frequency analyzers,” he says. “If I’m tuning all these strings – taking roughly an hour, depending on the stability of the tuning – it does get a little tiring on the brain.” In the early 20th century, Hafner writes in A Romance on Three Legs, there were more piano tuners in England’s insane asylums than members of any other trade.

Groves finally leaves the stage; moments later, Stewart Goodyear appears for his technical rehearsal for tonight’s performance. Goodyear, the 44-year-old inaugural artist-in-residence at the Glenn Gould School (from which he graduated at 15) and an internationally acclaimed Steinway artist, needs only five minutes to skip through passages of what he will play this evening, the slow second and virtuosically speedy third movement of Beethoven’s 23rd sonata. He’s listening for what he calls “choir,” checking the mechanism and touch of the new machine. The sonata was written shortly after Beethoven learned that his deafness was irreversible. He spent most of his career composing music that was bigger and more complex than the instruments of his day could manage. Beethoven and his fellow Romantics literally destroyed the pianofortes they played on, before Sébastien Érard invented the more robust forefather of the modern piano in the early 1800s. (The stock trading symbol of Steinway before Paulson took it private was LVB, for Ludwig van Beethoven.)

Open this photo in gallery:

“It already feels like a dream piano,” Goodyear says, one of the two best he has ever played. Perhaps more importantly, “I feel like the piano accepted me.” He’ll practice again for an hour in his office and then meditate for half an hour right before his dinner performance.

Groves pops back to retune. “The top F sounded like it was slightly out of phase,” he says, adjusting a few pins. Then he’s gone again.

Whereupon Dayou Kim walks on stage, her parents in tow. Dayou, a student in the Conservatory’s Taylor Academy, just turned 13. But she seems too sweet to be older than 10 – until she starts to play, at which point she has the assurance of a 35-year-old pro. She’ll play the second movement of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto at dinner, better known as the Elvira Madigan theme (after the movie of the same name), accompanied by a 20-piece orchestral ensemble. She’d never played it until three weeks ago. Her mother is carrying her concert shoes, a pair of sparkly low-heeled pumps: she slips them on and practises clumphing across the stage. She looks like a fawn taking its first steps. The concerto is one of Mozart’s most demanding, but you’d never know it in Dayou’s spidery, agile hands. She’s been playing piano since she was seven. She practises on her parents’ Yamaha baby grand for four to six hours every weekday, and for six to eight hours a day on weekends.

She runs through her piece four times: at the end of every go she turns immediately to her mother, a former composer who gave up her career. (“It’s a full-time job raising a prodigy,” Angie Law, the Conservatory’s senior director of marketing and a long-time fan of Dayou’s, told me recently.) The youngster was expecting the new piano’s action to be stiff, but instead she likes it. “It’s a good piano.” And what makes it a good piano? “A good piano is when it lets me express everything on the piano, when I can control everything,” she says. She read the backstory of Elvira Madigan to understand the music, but Elvira Madigan was the stage name of a tightrope walker (and amateur pianist) who was murdered in 1889 at the age of 21 by her lover when she tried to leave him – which is to say, long after Mozart wrote the music. But Dayou doesn’t need the backstory. “When the music’s sad,” she says, “I try to feel sad.” She doesn’t get nervous during performances. “I tell myself it’s just a practice and that I’m just having fun.” She has so much fun practising on the new Steinway, racing through not just her piece but snatches of her repertoire – Mendelssohn, Mozart, Debussy – that her mother has to tell her to stop. It’s breathtaking to watch.

In the end, the inaugural concert dinner went off without a hitch. Simon told the story of how they bought the “miraculous instrument,” and played his beloved Strauss Morgen! piece. He thanked Allan Kimberley, the former banker and industrial real-estate legend, and his wife, Pam Spackman, for donating the $300,000 to buy it. The meal was delicious (roast vegetable panzella, five-spice crispy duck with blackberry gastrique, Brie custard). Goodyear wowed everyone. Dayou Kim, in a blue organza dress and the sparkly shoes, filled the guests with awe. The third act, the jazz player and composer Robi Botos, brought everyone swinging and nodding and tapping back to earth with a rendition of Autumn Leaves. (Eric Clapton has a good version of it, too.) It was an original evening. Everyone seemed to leave satisfied.

But what keeps coming back to me is something else: that moment late in the day the piano arrived, when Anagnoson sat down to the freshly unwrapped Steinway to play it for the very first time. It was snowing outside, and all the news from the world beyond was terrible. It was not just the direness of events that was discouraging, but the apparent impossibility of doing anything to change their outcome – that all-too-familiar hopelessness, that liquid modern feeling. Eight people had been shot to death in Maryland and Pennsylvania that day, and eight others had been shot to death in Virginia and Florida the day before. Russia had strewn a hundred missiles across Ukraine in the course of 24 hours and people were arguing about U.S. election fraud and Elon Musk was being Elon Musk and the world was either afire or awash, just for starters.

Anagnoson sat up straight anyway, and squared his shoulders, and suspended his hands above the keys of the new piano. Then he played the opening chords of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn. It’s a lovely piece of music, one that opens and opens and opens, getting richer and deeper and more resonant as it does. It makes you feel that everything in your body suddenly rhymes.

Anagnoson kept grinning and laughing as he played, as he felt the piano’s heft and clarity, its power and brilliance. When it was over he rocked back in happiness and then jumped up and shook Groves’s hand, and even watchful, careful Damon Groves smiled. I imagine they were relieved to know they had done something good, and that they had done it well. Brahms’s chords rang out so generously, even in the tiny hallway alcove with the lousy acoustics, and showed everyone what the new piano could do, not just how it could carry, but what it could carry. It seemed to carry everyone. The new piano spoke. Don’t forget to look for beauty, it said, no matter how dark it gets outside.

Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.