The Brahms Piano

The piano I’m playing on these downloads is at Tippet Rise, in its all-larch Olivier Music Barn.

Let me talk about the Barn for a second. Every right angle is turned into a much wider angle by putting boards across it, so there are none of the harsh bounces which arise from notes bouncing back and forth and canceling one another out, creating half-tones and broken fragments of sound, when you have “right” angles. There’s nothing right about them....

Larch is a beautiful, light-colored wood, not too soft and not too hard, which gives a beautiful sonic coloration to notes.

Behind the larch is “cement board,” a high-strength sheetrock which is mold-, moisture-, and fire-resistant, made by the Hatschek process, during which unbleached cellulose fibers are repulped in water and then refined before being mixed with cement, water, silica, and limestone flour. The mixture is then deposited onto a wire substrate, vacuum dewatered, and cured to form a cement sheet. This creates a hard, concrete-like bounce, which helps the notes keep their integrity and their power. Since the sounds aren’t absorbed, they retain more of their shape and their information.

The ceiling is a smaller version of the ceiling at Snape Maltings, designed by Arup, the great architectural and acoustical firm.

Snape Maltings was a huge old barn in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, used for storing malt for the production of beer. Benjamin Britten, who was born nearby, bought the barn and repurposed it for his operas. The property has lawns rolling down to the North Sea coast, the ideal setting for outdoor (and indoor) productions of his nautical operas, such as Billy Budd and Peter Grimes. The acoustic design of the original barn was carried out in the 1960s by Derek Sugden of Arup, the company we hired to design our barn at Tippet Rise. Our team was led by Raj Patel, and our head acoustician was Alban Bassuet, who later became the first director of Tippet Rise. Arup continues to consult for Tippet Rise.

Sugden found that roof design was key to the long reverberation time requested by Britten. A slope of 45 degrees was considered the best option and resulted in what is known in design circles as the “Snape Roof.” It’s like putting a small barn as a cupola on top of a normal barn. The sound initially rises, bounces around in this extra space, and falls like sonic rain on the audience, softened, but with the same volume it started with.

Another Arup innovation is the “halo,” an extended ledge running around the room where the wall first meets the curve of the ceiling. This ledge, which in our case is a foot wide, catches the “first bounce.” This is where the sound first hits, and it returns a part of it instantly to the audience, giving the notes both accuracy and power.

What the Esterházys did when they built a room for Haydn, their court composer, in their Hungarian palace, Esterháza, was to recess the windows a few feet into a nook. Arup found that the sound bounces off the walls of this cranny, ignoring the window, thus removing the harsh echo of the glass from the sound pattern. Our one large window follows that design.

We further copied the exact dimensions of the Esterházy’s Hungarian “Haydnsaal.” It replicates the “divine ratio” which was used in the Parthenon, the Acropolis, the inner chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt, the temple of Apollo at Didyma, and the interior of the Mayan ziggurat of Chichen Itza. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier used the formula, as did his disciple, Josep Lluís Sert, who designed la Fondation Maeght. Debussy, Satie, and Bartók adapted it for music.

When you hear a Haydn quartet played in the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise, it sounds exactly the way it would have to Haydn and Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. The rests Haydn puts into his quartets decay to silence in the Barn in a perfectly measured amount of time before the next measure begins. The Barn thus copies the sound Haydn heard between 1766 and 1790, when he wrote most of his 80 string quartets (as well as many of his symphonies) at Esterháza. Although it was called the Versailles of Hungary due to its immensity, Haydn was miserable there. It was built on a swamp near the south shore of the Neusiedlersee, and there was nothing to do if you didn’t hunt.

The great novelist Mervyn Peake lived for a while next to the walls of the Castle of Sark, on which he modeled Gormenghast Castle, the real hero of his great Gormenghast Trilogy. His description of it is more Esterháza than Sark, a monstrosity in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of an endless sea, with its “shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” Esterháza was of course elegantly Viennese, in the Classical style, but its delicate Renaissance lintels and aedicules weren’t enough to hide its brutalist medieval bones.

The piano I’m playing was named Seraphina by its mentor, Tali Mahanor, the legendary technician of Lincoln Center, who discovered and renovated it. It is an 1897 Steinway D, from an era when strings were tuned unevenly. It was made the year Brahms died.

Most grand piano notes are produced by using three identical strings for added power for the majority of the notes. In 1897 and before, the strings weren’t tuned exactly together, to allow for what Tali calls the “zingy-zang,” that frisson, or shudder, or shimmer of harmonic fuzziness, where pitches swirl around in the air before finally deciding on their identities. This gives their notes a gossamer sheen, a luster, a burnish, the way a diamond dazzles from a dozen facets. This is how Brahms would have heard his music. Not the later laser-focus of a hardened metallic attack from a modern Steinway, but the soft, gaslit innuendo of a foray in the direction of a note, surrounded with the banter and buzz of an evening concert in a coffee house, Thonet chairs and elegant, marble tables topped with Sachertortes, environments beloved by the great architects, playwrights, and poets of Austria: Broch, Adler, Herzl, Schnitzler, Zweig, Freud, Schiele, Klimt, Loos, and, of course, Brahms.

To capture the sound of the ancient (but beautifully rejuvenated) piano in the resonant hall, six microphones were suspended above the piano, using what is called the Decca tree, made up of three mics and then two and then one forming a pyramid, which the great recording company Decca used to record the golden age of opera in the ‘50s and ‘60s. These mics are DPA 4006 omnidirectionals, renamed from B & K mics after a change of ownership. They are suspended about five feet out from the piano rim and about nine feet up in the air.

Two more Schoeps microphones live up higher and face the rear of the hall, to capture to room ambiance. The last two mics are Neumann omnidirectional tube mics down by the Steinway’s rim, like a drunken lounge lizard lazing by the piano in a cocktail bar, to capture cozier nuances of the singing midrange. Neumann tubes have been used over many decades to replicate the warm gamut of the human voice. They only hear so high and so low, as our ears do, and have a slope of diminishing sound which parallels that of the human ear. They have the same frailties people do, and so the sound decays from them as it does from our ears. They don’t sound as clinical and overly bright as technically better microphones, which are too good for our mortal ears. The sounds picked up by tubes are more distorted and down to earth, just the way the ear hears them.

DPA mics are slightly more modern, and thus noise free, with a sharper curve which hears notes higher and lower than we do, and thus present a more perfect world than the ancestral notes of Mozart or the Freudian lapses of Brahms prepare us for.

Seraphina was restored and prepared by Tali, who came up to Tippet Rise for several epic visits. Mike Toia, our resident technician, has maintained Seraphina ever since, along with our other instruments and many of our neighbor’s pianos as well. The nuance of one piano’s unique timbre, as compared with that of another piano, is best heard with a converter and headphones. At the end of our list of Frequently Asked Questions is a list of some converters and headphones.

Concert

On the snow-white pages Fingers bleed with cold, Frozen in the ages, Struggling to take hold

Of worlds whited-out By the stage’s silent throats, Paralyzed by doubt And disappearing notes,

Picks scratching in the night Of a chasm’s hieroglyphics, Suspended thinly on the height Of illusory specifics

Left behind like skins To illuminate the keys With discarded fashions And long-dead galaxies.