BRITISH PIANO

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 September 1923, Page 8

BRITISH PIANO

BEST IN THE WORLD. “I congratulate the manufacturers on the present standard of the aver-age-priced British piano. And I congratulate them the more cordially because on this class of piano very much depends, which it is the business of the musician to regard as important,” said Sir Landon Ronald, Principal of the Guildhall School of Music, London, in the course of a recent address. “The average-priced piano is the musical instrument of the people at large. It is the instrument which, more than any other, forms the musical taste of the people. From it they take the greater part of their musical sustenance. The music of hundreds of thousands of homes is almost exclusively the music of this class of piano. Take away from these homes the piano and however widely distributed the gramaphone may be—and the popularity of the gramaphone is a truly wonderful aid to the spread of musical knowledge among the people —take away from these homes the piano, the traditional home-instrument of the people, and you take away the main factor in the musical life of the people. “There is, further, the more expensive instrument, the piano of concertplatforms and of the homes where the ~ rlrx/1 4 « + lin haaf 111 H7l Cl oh-

piano demanded is the best piano obtainable by the accomplished perfor- | mer. It is able to satisfy the utmost demand upon it made by the most k exigent artist. I “For years before the war German ' pianos were a sort of fetish for many people, and they were a very serious - rival to British pianos. At that period many of the first-class German grands i were superior to our own. But it is interesting to recall that every invention which improved the original piano was a British invention—and that German piano-makers simply took over British inventions and worked at them with the customary German thoroughness. And to-day the British piano manufacturers have beaten the Germans at that game. Their craftsmanship, their thoroughness, their persistence, are making themselves felt. Since the war, the improvement in the British piano has been remarkable —there has been nothing like it in the piano manufacture of Germany or any other country. “For myself, I am well content to play a British piano, to recommend a British piano, to listen to a British piano. I know no better instrument than the product of the British piano manufactories. In the Guildhall School of Music, at all events, it long ago superseded the foreign instrument, and it is well known that I have always had the courage of my opinions and should not make these statements if they were not my honest belief.”