A spectacular sound experience, featuring 50 pianos. By Florian Riem
I always loved the grandeur of several keyboards alongside each other. Herbert von Karajan used two huge harpsichords to perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, himself playing one of them. Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos is another favourite, sometimes with unusual soloists like the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who played third piano alongside Christoph Eschenbach, Justus Franz and the London Philharmonic on a “dare-you recording” for EMI.
Then of course there is Bach’s rendition of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins, rewritten for four harpsichords; more than that are hard to find on the concert stage. I remember a carnival concert at Munich Musikhochschule that featured an unforgettable Rhapsody in Blue for 16 pianos, but that was rather the exception. Until 2018, that is, when Klangforum Wien’s Intendant Peter Paul Kainrath was invited to visit the factory of Hailun Pianos while on a trip to China. This popular Chinese piano maker is based in Ningbo, a city of eight million south of Shanghai. Hailun was founded 20 years ago by its namesake Chen Hailun and today builds some of the finest pianos in the Far East.
Kainrath, himself a former concert pianist, was shown not only the assembly line,
but also the upper floor of the Hailun Piano factory, where the ready-for-sale instruments are tested. At any given time, some 100 pianos are being “played” by machines, undergoing a 24-hour stress test, creating a gigantic mass of sound. Looking at the rows and rows of pianos, Kainrath had an idea. He took his mobile and called composer Georg Friedrich Haas.
Fast forward to August 2023, an exhibition centre in Bolzano, Italy, and the premiere of Haas’s 11,000 Saiten (11,000 Strings). “A crazy idea” as the composer calls it himself, “one of these ideas that there is no other possibility than to say yes!” In this work, 50 pianos that have been microtonally tuned against one another play together with a chamber orchestra. Arranged in a circle around the audience, each piano is tuned two cents higher than the last, reaching a semitone higher at the end of the circle and thus creating a rather unique sound experience. Indeed, the 50 instruments sound more like a single instrument than 50 individual ones. Celestial, ethereal harmony at the beginning of the hour-long work soon turns into major upheaval, a “futurist space opera” – some might hear a severe thunderstorm, others sense a space shuttle leaving the planet: the changing soundscapes are stunning.
Logistics for this project sound rather stunning, too. Hailun Pianos (who else) shipped 50 upright pianos to Italy, and the Mahler-Busoni Foundation in Bolzano provided the venue and musicians. Two outstanding Hailun piano technicians worked for 48 hours tuning and retuning to create this unique sound experience. Publisher Ricordi and its digital partner Newzik developed special performance material on tablets with automated page-turns. The 50 pianos were arranged in an outer circle with players facing outwards; the orchestra musicians (Mahler Academy Orchestra and Klangforum Wien) were seated in an inner circle, facing inwards to the audience, which was placed inside the circle and there was no conductor.
The audience’s reaction in Bolzano was overwhelming and even more so at the
Vienna Konzerthaus a few months later. “This is really about the future of music” explained Sisi Ye, Artistic Director at Hailun. “We educate the young generation not about classical music, about music of the past – we are telling a story about what the future of music may be like.”
Indeed, Haas leaves no doubts even in the first minutes of his new piece which takes the listeners on a kind of journey through outer space, traversing a hitherto unknown space of sound. Kainrath and Hailun are already working on the next performances: two concerts at the Prague Spring Festival (2 June), followed by another two shows at the Holland Music Festival in Amsterdam (22 June).
Photo: Hailun Pianos ©Hailun Pianos
