Farewell to the Kawai

If you love life as passionately as I do, then you embrace progress with enthusiasm, but sometimes you also experience twinges of regret when the old must give way to the new.  Five years ago today, I experienced both the enthusiasm and the regret as I bid adieu forever to an old friend and welcomed a new one.

As a child, I always dreamed of owning a grand piano, but I actually learned to play quite well practicing on a spinet.  As a young adult, the first piano I owned was another spinet, manufactured by Story and Clark.  In fact, my first serious compositions were completed while I possessed only that Story and Clark spinet.  During that period, I finished my first piano sonata in 1982, followed by my Nocturne No. 1 in February 1983.

That same February, however, I had the opportunity to acquire at a good price the very nice grand piano seen here, a 1977 Kawai Classic (5’10”).  I kept the spinet a little longer, and in fact the two pianos were used together in a concert in my home during the fall of 1983, where I played the piano part from Beethoven’s first piano concerto on the Kawai while a friend realized the orchestral reduction on the spinet.  The Kawai remained my faithful companion through subsequent decades of composing, practicing, numerous musical soireés, piano teaching, and recording sessions.  The instrument held up well, needing only regular tunings, replacement of a few broken strings, and occasional voicing of the hammers and adjustments to squeaky pedals.  The bench was replaced around the end of 2017.

Five years ago today, on August 21, 2018, I played the Kawai for the last time, finishing with Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in B Minor and some passages from my third sonata.  I hoped its next owner would bless it with more Rachmaninoff. The piano movers took it out around 10:30AM. A few minutes later they brought in … the subject of the next post to this blog. 🙂