Back in California

Alameda, July 2

On Wednesday evening, a nice crowd gathered at John Callahan’s piano restoration shop in Alameda for a   book reading and a couple of hours of piano playing. The occasion was the sendoff of a beautiful 1910 flame mahogany Steinway Model O owned by the Cornland family and refinished to perfection by John’s team. The piano was to be sent off to Sweden the following day. Booksellers from Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley came to sell books, John and Nancy put out some delicious food, served some lovely wine (including a beautiful Callahan cabernet) and everyone settled in for an evening of beautiful music and readings from the book.

As it turned out, it wasn’t merely a lovely evening. It was magical.

I was up first, with a brief talk about the book, during which I described what it was like to have John come over to my house to interview Verne on the speaker phone, in order to try to understand what, exactly, Verne had done to CD 318 to make it so responsive.

To my delight, I noticed that the group included several piano fetishists — the opimal kind of crowd for the book. People were buying copies of the book not just for themselves but for others as well: the pianists, teachers, tuners and Gould fans in their lives.

Then three frighteningly talented young pianists — Rachel Breen, Christine Xu and Chloe Ma, ages, 12, 13 and 7 –sat down to the Cornland piano and flew through a breathtaking array of Bach, Brahms, Chopin etc. You name it, these squirts could play it.

The most adorable part was watching seven-year-old Chloe, in her pink dress, almost stand up in order to reach the pedals.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

This is a Web site and blog about Glenn Gould, the pianos Gould knew and loved, and the world of piano tuning. And it is about musicians and their relationship to their instruments.

The blog will focus on the publication of A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano just published by BloomsburyUSA.

Advance praise for the book:

“The musical version of Seabiscuit . . . Lucidly graps[s] the essential: the complex interaction among an artist, a craftsman and the precious tool they both revered. Written with authority and enthusiasm, a treat for armchair musicologists, Gould fanatics and even those who never heard a note he played.” — Kirkus Reviews.

“The story of Glenn Gould’s haunted and relentless search for the perfect piano, one that felt right and sounded as beautiful as the one in his imagination, is a story for all music lovers. And for musicians it is especially bittersweet, as we find that there is a bit of Gould’s com[ulsive drive for the perfect sound in all of us.” — Daniel J. Levitin, author of This is your Brain on Music.

Listen to: The Aria from the Goldberg Variations