Harriet Howard Heithaus for Naples Daily News
Trumpet soloists carry their own brass, and violinists their own strings. But Mike Cheng-Yu Lee is one of the few performers who brings his own 450-pound piano.
Lee, who performs in the Bower Chapel in Naples Tuesday, performs on an exact replica of Mozart’s personal piano, which has a distinct and different sound that he wants people to hear, for several reasons.
“I am of the conviction composers created for what they had — their instruments, their vocalists,” he said. “So for many years this has been my focus to rethink the music in terms of the sound they were writing for. And we know these were drastically different from what we hear today.
“The pianos of Mozart’s day were speaking instruments. The pianos of the later 19th century to today are singing instruments,” he continued.
“The later the piano, the longer the sustain of the tone. For instance, later pianos have iron frames whereas 18th-century instruments like Mozart’s had a wood frame, they were strung more lightly (and) the keys are smaller and lighter. That all adds up to music that is much more volatile and, in a sense, more exciting.”
Another difference: All the strings inside pianos of Mozart’s day were strung parallel to each other, giving them their own voices. In today’s pianos, the lower strings are on a diagonal over the strings for the higher notes. It’s known as cross-stringing,
Cross-stringing allows for more notes than on Mozart’s five-octave keyboard. It also gives the lower notes a sound closer to the register, or voice, of midrange notes because they’re struck by the hammers closer to the same point on the string. The musicians of Mozart’s time would sniff at that as homogenized.
There are other differences. Lee will use Beethoven’s famous “Moonlight” movement of the Sonata No. 14 to demonstrate on Tuesday. To offer a sustain on the early pianos, the performer pushed a knee pedal that lifted dampers from the strings. The entire “Moonlight” movement is written by Beethoven to be played “without dampers,” which would translate on today’s instrument to keeping your foot on the sustain pedal the entire time.
“This would be unthinkable on a modern piano,” Lee said, describing the harmonic jumble that would follow. “On the pianos of that day, however, the previous harmony dies away, allowing room for the next one to come in.”
Lee is giving a master class to students in Naples the day after his concert, and he says their reactions are profound.
“They’re shocked in all kinds of ways. There surprised how difficult it is to play these pianos because they are so light and volatile. It’s as if you trained as a tennis player suddenly you playing ping-pong and it’s very, very fast,” he said.
“My intention is not to have people to play on old instruments, but to learn from them,” Lee said. He certainly has: He won second prize and audience prize at the 2011 Westfield International Fortepiano Competition by a jury that included Robert Levin and the late Christopher Hogwood; he’s lectured and performed all over the country and has recorded.
A warning on Lee’s concert: It will probably be his first and last here. Lee has accepted a post at Australian National University as lecturer of performance and director of the ANU Keyboard Institute. He and his piano are leaving the country in little more than a month.
The New Zealand native, a self-admitted piano geek, has had an adventurous stay in the United States, however. He held the post of lecturer of music theory at Yale University, which has a museum with 26 different antique keyboard instruments. Lee also spent also spent two years as visiting assistant professor and a post-doctoral scholar at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University.
But Australia has one of the southern hemisphere’s largest collections of historical pianos, with 50 keyboard instruments at last count. Lee hasn’t even seen them yet and he can barely conceal his excitement.
“I am so much looking forward to that,” he declared.
Grand Piano Series | Mike Cheng-Yung Lee
» When: Tuesday, June 20, at 7:30 p.m.
» Where: Bower Chapel, 120 Moorings Park Drive, Naples
» Tickets: $40
» Info: www.grandpianoseries.org or 469-333-3231
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