Product Description
Synopsis
This beautifully written and lavishly illustrated history of the piano is at once remarkably informative and uniquely engaging. Performer and music historian Richard Burnett traces the development of the piano from its origins to the present day, drawing on examples of keyboard instruments from his internationally known collection at the Finchcocks Museum in Kent, England. Sixty-one of these instruments, including organs, harpsichords, clavichords, and a wide range of pianos, feature in a social as well as musical history of the piano. Richard Burnett is an international concert pianist who acquired Finchcocks, a beautiful Georgian mansion, in 1971 as a home for his growing collection. His fascinating book ingeniously interweaves the biographies of the instruments themselves with the history of the various manufacturing firms and the remarkable lives of some of the builders and the musicians associated with them, all set against the vividly depicted social backdrop of the periods under review. In the second part of his book, the author looks particularly at how the technical development of the instruments influenced the output of masters such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and others. The fast-flowing anecdotal style of the writing offers rich interest and entertainment to the general reader as much as to those who already have some knowledge of the subject. The book also includes a CD, in which the music of thirty-three of the Finchcocks period instruments can be heard being played by Richard Burnett and Steven Devine.
