U-M Hosts Vladimir Horowitz's Famous Steinway Piano

[@rmiddlehouse]

You know you’re good when they host your piano

[@jeffreybryan8377]

For sure!🙄lol.

[@daniellu8282]

Adorable how he pets his piano walking on stage.

[@stefanufer608]

Very touching - as someone once put it, he was “reassuring the instrument as well as himself”!

[@nathanhickeyhickey8693]

Any piano without the addition of a human being has no life to speak of . Add Mr Horovitz to any piano and this brings life beyond measure.We are fortunate to know such beauty through Vladimir.

[@RS-zh2md]

Nice to finally get proof that Horowitz' greatness was not due to his piano.

[@FrancisAsin-Gioro]

No one think that

[@walterprossnitz3471]

No of course not, but as the student says, there is an extraordinary range of color built into the instument. And it does have a very, very light action which makes some things easy - and other things (like controlling pianissimo) very difficult! The video showing Horowitz visiting the Tchaikovsky museum near Moscow is an example of him playing a different piano, one that he undoubtedly had never played before. And yet all the colors and all the inner drama is there, like always in his best playing.

[@monicabrondo4149]

Que legado tan emotivo...!!...Ese entrañable piano que acompaño por tantos años al Maestro Horowitz ,pueda ser disfrutado y reverenciado por alumnos y profesores de esta Universidad.....!!...

[@bt10ant]

0:23 Oscar Levant in the picture. He was actually the highest paid classical pianist in the 30's and 40's.

[@xman_hall]

Where’s the piano now?? I’ve been trying to find it to play it! Does anyone know?

[@OE1FEU]

Rarely do people mention that this piano has been completely rebuilt after Horowitz' death in 1989, so except for the cabinet there is nothing left of what the actual Horowitz piano was all about. Apart from that, Robert is a really great piano technician and the way he prepares the UMich's own piano for a recital is a marvel and certainly doesn't sound any worse than the famous Horowitz piano.

[@789armstrong]

Does anybody know what adjustments Franz Mohr made to Horowitz original piano?

[@RichardJamesMendoza]

@@789armstrong among other things, the action was lighter than the standard for grand pianos. The hammers were heavily filed and lacquered, which gave that distinctively bright sound.

[@donaldallen1771]

@@789armstrong I met Franz in Boston at Steinert's when he toured with that piano the year after Horowitz's death. At that time, the piano was in the same condition as when Horowitz was alive. I played it for about 1/2 an hour. The action was incredibly light and the voicing was beyond bright. The muscular sound Horowitz made in the bass? It was the piano -- I made the same sound. Things that tire me on my own piano (a Mason and Hamlin BB that Franz's son rebuilt for me about 20 years ago) were easy on that piano. But -- controlling the sound was a huge problem. How Horowitz got the colors he did on that instrument is a mystery. For me the lightness of the action almost turned the keys into switches -- on or off. I played the piano again about 13 years later. By then, it had been rebuilt and was set up in much more normal fashion than Horowitz required. I think that was a huge mistake on Steinway's part. They destroyed a historical object.

[@789armstrong]

@@donaldallen1771 I believe the pedals had adjustments too, especially the quiet pedal.

[@kunfupapa8162]

@@donaldallen1771 How Horowitz got the colors he did on that instrument is probably related to his use of pedals. In my opinion ! The way he wanted his piano to sing as much as possible (on a percussive instrument) clearly has something to do with pedals. That's why nobody sounds exactly like him, even when they play his piano. They possibly don't understand how you get colors from sustaining a note by keeping your finger on the key while pulling up the pedal and releasing the key at the right time. It is possible to get a radiance from the 'doubled' sound you sustain either with finger or pedal, knowing the exact moment when you need to let go of one of them while the other goes on. This conflict of sonorities which is beautiful is particularly noticeable in his Moscow recital or in the Bach-Busoni Chorale in D minor he played for 'The Last Romantic'.

[@eddiebeato5546]

The piano may hold some secrets to the legend of Vladimir Horowitz. We all know that a piano's action could be adjusted to suit the pianist's pianism, and the heavier the action, the greater the difficulty to play works demanding great dexterity and speed. Over the years, renown piano makers, such as Steinway & Sons, have ameliorated the sensitive weight-action of a piano to be less than 50 grams (the standard). According to Franz Morh, in My Life with the Great Pianists, Horowitz' piano's action was adjusted to be less than 44 grams.

[@donaldallen1771]

Yes -- see my comment above. Both the action and voicing were very unusual.

[@papagen00]

Is this a NY or Hamburg?

[@78pianist]

Yes, the piano may have changes, but none of these pianists shown in this video have tone colours even remotely similar to Horowitz.

[@papagen00]

2:20 that looks like my prof. Joseph Kerman? Go Bears!

[@Leopold_Godowsky]

King of model D-274 s

[@davidsalazar2466]

The amount of money this men spent taking his piano with him.

[@PaulJones-oj4kr]

Affected commentary. What's that about??

[@dennisdeemii]

I wonder if this is the piano he had the action switched to a yamaha?

[@eitanjakoubovitch3440]

00:60

Why isn’t Josh Wright playing on that piano?

[@enoughbs7645]

Why would that loser be playing this piano?

[@geolin5578]

envy.

[@rennedelorean3341]

Horowitz and Rachmaninov were very close friends (big age differance) In an interview Horowitz said "Yes, he liked the way I played, I was like a son to him." Horowitz is one of the few that never recorded the #2 in C Maj . . . I wish he had.

[@donaldallen1771]

The 2nd Concerto is in c-minor.

[@stefanufer608]

The piano won’t sound like Horowitz because none of them is Horowitz

[@KosmasLapatas]

I consider this specific model a bad piano as well as Gould's of course. By todays standards is not on par with great grand pianos. Bechstein D-282, Bluthner O-280, Bösendorfer Imperial, Fazioli F308, Grotrian Royal, Mason & Hamlin CC-94, Ravenscroft 275, Schimmel K280, Seiler SE-278, Shigeru Kawai SK-EX, Stuart & Sons 296, Yamaha CFX 9' destroy this completely. However it is the piano of a piano giant and its value resides therein.

[@KosmasLapatas]

Maafa 1619 fazioli is mentioned of course

[@tnmtemerity]

Bosendorfer, Yamaha, etc would have loved to have Horowitz on their rosters, yet he stuck with Steinway. Hmmmm

[@Thiago-px9ev]

@@tnmtemerity Maybe because he fixed residence in the USA, and Steinway is from USA?

[@huyhoangan962]

@@Thiago-px9ev german

[@Thiago-px9ev]

@@huyhoangan962 Partially german, yes. But the company was founded in the USA. Horowitz's piano also was a New York one.

[@torresedith4023]

Can they stop talking?

[@gouldbergvariations]

Its amazing how useless new pianists are. Horowitz, Horowitz and then again only Horowitz