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How Does a Piano Get to Carnegie Hall?
Sun May 11, 9:18 AM ET Add Top Stories - The New York Times to My Yahoo!


By JAMES BARRON The New York Times

The contest was between a giant sandwich of wood 18 strips of maple, each about half as long as a city bus and half a dozen workers with muscles, a pneumatic wrench and a time-conscious foreman. The workers were supposed to bend and shove those 18 strips into a familiar-looking shape, and beat the clock. "We're allotted 20 minutes," the foreman, Joseph Gurrado, muttered.


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After 14 minutes of pushing and pulling and flexing and grunting that another boss standing nearby called "the Fred Flintstone part of the operation," the wood was forced into a curve. And, in the too-warm basement of a gritty factory that opened when Ulysses S. Grant was president, piano No. K0862 was born.


Like other newborns, it came with hopes for greatness and fears that it might not measure up despite a distinguished family name, Steinway.


Or that it would be grumbled about by Steinway's customers temperamental, obsessive, finicky pianists whose love-hate relationship with the company and its products is as complicated and emotional as anything in Chekhov. Yes, pianists grouse that Steinways are not what they used to be. Yes, pianists ascribe whatever faults they found in whatever Steinway they just played to every Steinway. And no, the majority would never play anything but.


Steinway knows all this. Like No. K0862, every new piano that rolls out of the Steinway & Sons factory in Astoria, Queens, next to oil tanks that block the view of the Rikers Island jails is an attempt to refute the notion that the only good Steinway is an old Steinway.


So how good will No. K0862 be? Will it sound like "a squadron of dive bombers," as the pianist Gary Graffman said of a Steinway he hated on first hearing but came to love? Or will it begin life with the enormous bass and sweet-singing treble that pianists prize the way wine lovers prize a 1989 Romanée-Conti? Will it be good enough for Steinway's concert division, which supplies pianos to big-name artists?


No one can say. Not yet.


It will take about eight months to finish No. K0862, an 8-foot 11 3/8-inch concert grand. Along the way, the rim will be aged in a room as dim as a wine cellar. It will be sprayed with lacquer, rubbed and sprayed again.


Its 340-pound iron plate will be lowered in and lifted out 10 or 12 times. It will spend time in rooms where workers wear oxygen masks to avoid getting headaches (or getting high) from smelly glues. It will be broken in by a machine that plays scales without complaint, unlike a student.


Someone walking through the factory, following the progress of No. K0862, could forget a basic fact about what goes on there: Every Steinway is made the same way from the same materials by the same workers. Yet every Steinway ends up being different from every other not in appearance, perhaps, but in ways that are not easily put into words: colorations of sound, nuances of strength or delicacy, what some pianists call personality. Some Steinways end up sounding small or mellow, fine for chamber music. Some are so percussive a full-strength orchestra cannot drown them out. On some, the keys move with little effort. On others, the pianist's hands and arms get a workout.


Why? No one at Steinway can really say.


Perhaps it is the wood. No matter how carefully Steinway selects or prepares each batch, some trees get more sunlight than others in the forest, and some get more water. Certain piano technicians say uncontrollable factors make the difference.


Perhaps, in a plant where everyone is an expert craftsman, some are great, others merely good.


Someday, if its personality turns out to be extroverted but not strident, if its key action turns out to be loose but not mushy, No. K0862 may be pounded or caressed in public by someone like Alfred Brendel or Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. First, though, No. K0862 will be pounded and caressed in the factory by woodworkers with tattoos on their burly arms, by technicians known as bellymen, by tuners confident that they can improve it, no matter how good it sounds at first.


There is Anthony Biondi, 31, who was hired nine years ago as a veneer cutter, someone who selects wood for rims. His tools include the oldest machine still used in the factory, a 130-year-old cutter, and the newest, a million-dollar trimmer that arrived in January.


There is his boss, Mr. Gurrado, the foreman. In a company once legendary for its "lifers," he is a new kind of middle manager. When Steinway hired him in 2000, he had no experience in woodworking but 15 years of manufacturing everything from leather goods to lemonade. He replaced a foreman who retired after 41 years of making Steinway rims.


And there is Andrew Horbachevsky, the 44-year-old manufacturing director, who has worked for Steinway for 15 years. "This company kind of sucks you in," he said. "I've had a dream where my wife turned into a piano."





A Holdout in Queens

Steinway remains one of the last outposts of hand craftsmanship in a machine-dominated industry in what was once a boomtown for piano makers. Steinway is now one of the last large manufacturing operations in New York City, which the State Labor Department (news - web sites) says lost 666,400 factory jobs between 1962 and the end of last year, when 217,000 remained.

Unlike competitors that left for plants in the Sun Belt, Steinway has stayed put. The factory was originally the centerpiece of a 400-acre company town where Steinway workers lived in Steinway-built houses and shopped at Steinway-owned stores.

By moving everything but their store and their offices out of Manhattan, the Steinways hoped to elude 19th-century labor turmoil. They succeeded, for a while.

Eventually, the Steinways sold all but 11 acres, and, in 1972 they sold the company itself, which was unionized in the 1930's. But their name remains on Steinway Street, and company officials say that most of the 450 workers at the plant still live in the neighborhood. Mr. Biondi, the veneer cutter, bicycles to work in warm weather.

Real Ebony? $50,000

Now as in the past, the products made in the Steinway factory are famous, and famously expensive. No. K0862 will sell for about the same as one of the most expensive Mercedes-Benz coupes: $92,800.

No. K0862 will have what Steinway calls an ebonized finish, meaning it will be painted black. Real ebony is available, for an extra $50,000: Steinway says it has no effect on the sound. But the guts of every concert grand the strings, the hammers that strike them, the keys to which the hammers are attached are identical.

That raises the question of age. Is a brand-new piano ready the moment it leaves the factory?

Maybe, maybe not. In the 1920's, a golden age for Steinway, there were probably pianists and tuners who whined that the best pianos were those made at the end of the 19th century. There are certainly pianists today with a fondness if not a reverence for Steinways from the 1920's and 1930's. "The majority of instruments from back then, there's a level of color and personality that is undeniable," said the pianist Stephen Hough.

As for what comes out of the factory these days, the pianist Erika Nickrenz said: "The brand-new Steinways tend to be a little blank. They have all the characteristics, but it takes pianists to play them and really bring out what's there." But, in a tryout at Steinway's showroom in Manhattan, she preferred a concert grand that left the factory on April 27 to four others, including one from 1962.

"Older is not better, and we can prove it," said Bruce A. Stevens, the company's president. "Where that started was with people who make their living rebuilding Steinways, and they tell their customers that. We've just about given up rebutting it." But not completely. A moment later, he used the word poppycock.

Determining which pianos are great is terribly subjective. In 1981, The Atlantic Monthly watched Steinway assemble a concert grand, No. K2571. By the time the magazine published its 18,000-word article, that piano had been put before André-Michel Schub, who picked a different instrument for a recital at the factory. But Richard Goode played No. K2571 at Alice Tully Hall.

And then, when it was not quite two years old, Rudolf Serkin adopted it. "He wasn't really happy with the Steinways he had been playing in concert," recalled the manager of Steinway's dealership in Boston, Paul Murphy. So Steinway lined up half a dozen grands for Serkin to try.

He chose No. K2571 and had it shipped first to the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and later to his studio nearby. It stayed there until shortly before his death in 1991, when Mr. Murphy delivered a new piano, hauled away No. K2571 and gave it the equivalent of a 100,000-mile tuneup. Mr. Murphy later sold No. K2571 to a medical student from Japan. She took it to Kyoto.

Guts of Steel

In the two decades since that piano left the factory, Steinway has done some modernizing. Computer-generated bar codes now track the parts of a piano in the making. In 1981, one way that was done was on file cards in the pocket of a great-grandson of the company's founder.

Machines now cut the wood for the lids and legs something done by hand until about 15 years ago. "This is furniture-making," Mr. Horbachevsky said. But he added, "There are operations we can't automate because that would take the soul out of Steinway."

One of those operations is the one Mr. Gurrado inherited last year, rim-bending. It had gone unchanged for so long because the piano has gone unchanged for so long.

What Steinway's original square pianos or its earliest grands did not have were rigid rims. The company's second generation perfected that. One of the Steinways after the ampersand in the company's name, C.F. Theodore Steinway, held more than 40 patents and collaborated with the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz to marry the methodology of science to the making of pianos. They reasoned that longer and stronger strings would produce a larger and louder sound but would also put extreme pressure on the rim.

C.F. Theodore Steinway's solution is Mr. Gurrado's: rim lamination. C.F. Theodore Steinway figured that gluing thin strips of wood together would create a rim noticeably stronger and more durable than one crafted from just one or two thick boards. Even the glue would add strength. Laminating the rim was one of the innovations that made possible an instrument with a big sound, the grand piano Steinway has manufactured ever since.

When a Book Is a Sandwich

The eight-month manufacturing schedule for No. K0862 does not include the morning Mr. Biondi spent slicing the stack of wood for the rim into pieces 3/16 of an inch thick and roughly eight feet long. Nor the time he spent taping those pieces into 22-foot-long strips to form the "book," as the sandwich of wood that becomes a rim is known at the factory.

Among Steinway's workers, Mr. Horbachevsky says, rim-bending was once dominated by Italians. No one can say for sure why they were hired for those jobs more often than for others, but when a job was available, someone at Steinway would tell a friend, who would apply.

In the 1980's, Caribbean immigrants began taking the place of Italians who retired. In the 1990's, the labor pool changed again. Now the crew includes three Bosnians.

Among them is Nazif Sutrovic, who was a police official in Sarajevo during the 1984 Winter Olympics (news - web sites) and has worked at Steinway since 1997. Apologizing for his balky English, he says, "I don't have time to go to school." He has another job, as the superintendent of a Brooklyn apartment building.

The Wood Gets Amnesia

On the way to what Steinway calls the rim-bending machine though it is essentially a piano-shaped vise perfected by C. F. Theodore Steinway, and has no motor Mr. Gurrado's crew made an important stop They fed the book, layer by layer, through a glue-spreader that looks something like a washer with a wringer. At the far end, two workers, Tommy Stavrianos and Jean Robert Laguerre, dipped brushes in glue pots for touch-ups.

Mr. Stavrianos at 28, the youngest man on the crew and his colleagues talk proudly of the pianos they make and the company's traditions. But they are not the concert-hall regulars that their pianos are. The radios around the factory play soft rock and jazz, not stations where Steinway artists are often heard.

The rim-benders use their physical strength in a way that is unusual in a modern factory. At 9:54 a.m., the crew leader, Eric Lall, is busy shoving the book into place along the side of the piano where the keys for the bass notes will be. He begins tightening spindles on the clamps while Patrick Acosta, 30, uses a long-handled lever to force the rest of the book toward the big curve at the end.

Mr. Acosta says this is all the exercise he needs, or gets: "I build pianos. That's my workout." The lever in his hands weighs 80 pounds. The clamps "posts," the crew calls them are 65 pounds each.

At 10:10, with a whack from Mr. Acosta, the rim is done. "Fourteen minutes," Mr. Gurrado says.

The time allotted for bending a rim is 20 to 25 minutes. As he explains, "We're working against the glue." It begins to set that fast.

The rim spends its first 24 hours clamped in place. "Wood has a memory," Mr. Gurrado says. The day in the clamps is deprogramming time, so the wood will forget its past and not pop out of its new shape.

After three days across the workroom from where it was bent Mr. Gurrado does not want to shock it by moving it out of a by-now-familiar environment too quickly it goes to a room that looks like a wine cellar but is warm and dry and on an upper floor in the factory. It will spend about 60 days there, with 500 other rims that are awaiting sounding boards, plates and keys.

"It's going to be whatever it's going to be, good or whatever," Mr. Stavrianos says after parking it there. "There's nothing you can do now but wait. It's out of our hands."