FACTUAL
The Piano Man
Thursday 11 May 2006 11:30-12:00 (Radio 4 FM)
Repeated: Monday 15 May 2006 0:15-0:45 (Radio 4 FM)
Musician, composer and actor Philip Pope presents the remarkable story of Paolo Fazioli, who redesigned the piano and created an instrument to rival Steinway.
In 1978, Venetian Paolo Fazioli turned his back on the family engineering business with a crazy ambition: to design a piano from scratch which would rival the great Steinway Grands. Remarkably, within three years he had done what no other piano manufacturer had ever done. He had reinvented a musical instrument and created a different kind of piano. Although the Fazioli looks like a piano and sounds like a piano, it is virtually a new kind of instrument and contains thousands of innovations.
This feature explores how Fazioli did it, what the impact has been on the world of serious music and just what it is that draws so many pianists and music fans to the sound of these instruments.
Featuring interviews with Paolo Fazioli himself, celebrated concert pianists and Fazioli devotees Nikolai Demidenko and Mark Swartzentruber, Gramophone magazine critic Bryce Morrison and Royal College of Music Professor Ruth Nye, who was immediately moved to tears the first time she heard the unique timbre of a Fazioli.
