Beethoven Pianos Featured in The New York Time's Editor's Choice: The Grand Obsession by Perri Knize
NEW YORK TIMES "EDITOR'S CHOICE." WASHINGTON POST "BEST OF 2008."
The daughter of a professional musician, Perri Knize was raised in a home saturated in classical music, but it wasn't until midlife, in the midst of her successful career as a investigative reporter, that she realized she'd missed her true calling –the piano. After years of lessons, she decides to buy a piano of her own and begins her search. She falls madly, illogically, in love with a rare German grand she discovers in a New York City Showroom. After a long dalliance, Knize refinances her house to buy this "magic" instrument she dubs "Marlene", after Dietrich, for its sultry voice. But when Marlene arrives at her home in Montana, the sound that transfixed her is gone, the tone dead and dull. One piano tuner after another arrives to fix it, but no one can.
Rather than send the piano back, Knize embarks on a mad quest to restore the instrument to its rightful sound –and to understand the reason for its elusive power. Putting her investigative skills to work, she falls down a rabbit hole into a hidden world, discovering a tribe of concert artists, dealers, technicians, composers, designers, physicists, philosophers, passionate amateurs, and instrument builders –intriguing and eccentric characters all –whose lives have also been transformed by the spell if a piano. She even hikes into the Austrian Alps to learn how the special trees used to build her piano are grown and harvested. With each step of her journey, Knize draws ever-closer to uncovering the reason her piano's sound vanished, how to get it back, and the deeper secret of how music leads us to a direct experience of the nature of reality.
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Beethoven Piano Move to 211 58th Street Mentioned on WQXR.com: Musical Chairs on Piano Row as Klavierhaus Moves Out
New York’s Piano Row just got smaller.
The piano dealer Klavierhaus, a favored haunt for international pianists since the 1990s, on Monday moved out of its storefront showroom on West 58th St. after a competitor, Beethoven Pianos, purchased the building and took over its space. Klavierhaus has moved to a new location several blocks away.
The transaction is the latest in a series of moves that signal the downsizing of the midtown piano retail district, which sits between Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and for decades has drawn piano buyers from around the world. (Also remaining are Faust-Harrison and Allegro Pianos, a far cry from the 1980s when nearly a dozen piano businesses ruled the block.)
Beethoven Pianos will lose about 2,000 square feet when it moves to the new 4,000-square-foot storefront, a move that is expected next week. Demler notes, however, that much of his company’s restoration work is done out of a 34,000-square-foot facility in the Bronx. A fixture on Piano Row for more than 40 years, Beethoven Pianos is known for its more populist appeal and ability to attract walk-in clients.