Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition

'You think the piano is an instrument? It is like a hundred instruments!' These are the words that one of the truly greatest 'keyboard lions' of the second half of the 19th century used to impress upon his piano students time and again: Anton Rubinstein, the Russian pianist, composer, and conductor who, following Franz Liszt's departure from the concert stage, rose to become the undisputed leading international concert pianist due to his hyper-virtuosity and powerful expressive capability. In offering this advice to his students, Rubinstein was, of course, also thinking of the 'modern' concert grands of his time, with their vast tonal range, powerful basses, sonorous mid-ranges, and shimmering upper registers—instruments that provided players with a broad palette of colors and nuances at their fingertips. It was for such instruments that Modest Mussorgsky composed his only major piano work—"Pictures at an Exhibition"—which maximizes the potential of these instruments, from the finest shadings to the most massive clusters of sound, and in which the solo piano indeed seems to multiply into a hundred instruments. Stefan Arnold performs this work on a Steinway Model D concert grand built around 1900. The piano was carefully restored, a prerequisite for which was an intact soundboard with balanced curvature and stringing adapted to the structural forces of the instrument. Based on existing measurements of the grand, a new keyboard with optimized lever ratios was crafted as the fundamental requirement for a modern touch. Additionally, a set of hammer heads, modified after an old model, was created, as modern hammer heads sometimes tend to overdrive historical instruments. Thus, this grand piano offers an impressive symbiosis between a modern touch and the original soundscape and sonic ideal.