the (second) Steinway
I am in love with pianos.
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Those unfortunate souls who hang out with me find that out very quickly.
If there’s a piano somewhere, I tend towards it.
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A piano is a beautiful instrument.
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A handcrafted piano - with thousands of loving hours painstakingly invested in every tiny detail - is a work of art. It is every pianist’s greatest joy, responding to the slightest touch upon its keys. Every nuance you subtly impart translates into wonderful shades of colour, depth and expression.
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I remember the first time I laid my unworthy, grimy, fat fingers upon a Steinway & Sons - the concert grand in Victoria Memorial Hall. The year was 1998, and it was the Anderson Junior College Choir’s debut of Miss Saigon. I was going to make my first public show on the Steinway by playing The Heat Is On In Saigon. The Steinway that so many celebrated pianists had played upon. What a blast!
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I remember in the hours before the concert was to begin, my friend Zhengyu and I were playing Rachmaninoff (me and him) and Beethoven (only him) on it, and the rich sound carried all the way to the back of the hall quite clearly. And that hall has less-than-ideal acoustics. Okay, okay, we thought it was a nice hall, until the Durian was built.
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The next time I tried a Steinway upright was in the new showroom at Takashimaya. Apparently the showroom at Centerpoint didn’t hold the dealership for Steinways anymore, etcetera etcetera, and I shall not talk more about that. So it went to the shop at Taka, and they were nice enough to let passer-bys try the pianos. The moment I laid my fingers on the keys I knew it was no ordinary piano.
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I declare that I am a lousy pianist. Well, at least, a lousy classical pianist. I can no longer play Beethoven, nor Bach, nor Brahms, nor Bollywood (not that I could play them before). I don’t dare to play anything remotely "classical" when anyone is around, for fear that he or she may instantly recognise my complete inability to perform it properly. How embarrassing.
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So I play things like Somewhere Over the Rainbow, or Somewhere Out There, or just some song. But, I tell you, the moment I touched those keys, I felt the magic. A hair-raising, spine-tingling, electric magic. And the deep, rich notes made my day. It was like seeing a Bentley waft by on the road, serene in all its majestic glory.
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You know how some pianos are absolutely crap. It takes a brave soul to play them. Let me tell you about the cultural desert called NTU. Concession, it’s not a cultural desert. It just has some very, very bad pianos.
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Hall 7 has a piano with a key that sounds like it plays two notes simultaneously. Someone might have deliberately mis-tuned one of the strings on that note (each note has three strings if I am not wrong). Then take Hall 3 - The piano is almost devoid of any sort of expression throughout the keystroke. It sounds as dead as a doornail. I have not tried the rest of the hall pianos yet. But I am bracing myself for a very hair-raising (in all the wrong senses of the phrase) time ahead.
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But the issue that takes the cake is that Hall 9, which I live in, has NO piano. The cruel hand of fate (or irony) struck a blow, most evilly, upon this wretched creature. I thought about it long and hard, and came to the miserable conclusion that I must have done so many bad things in my life that I am now deprived of my most basic need, the piano, as a punishment.
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Deprive me of food, deprive me of water. Deprive me of my handkerchief and I may still survive. But the piano, not the piano! What did I do to deserve this agony?
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No wonder that my bicycle has been receiving an inordinate amount of attention recently.
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These days, I only play sad English love songs, and some really sad Chinese love songs. My current favourites are Two Beds and a Coffee Machine by Savage Garden… ah heck, you can read the rest in my profile. It’s all there, well most of it anyway. However, I still like the Chinese songs better. They seem to connect with me better than the English songs. I’m thinking it could be the pentatonic (five-note) scale that the tunes use. Who knows?
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But to be very objective, Corrine May’s Same Side of the Moon is rather poignant. It tells of loneliness, and the emptiness of being apart. Listen to the song and let the words pluck at your heartstrings and pierce the depths of your soul.
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You know I can’t be that far from you, if we’re both looking on the same side of the moon.
