The Original Bösendorfer Piano of ERNST VON DOHNANYI

Dohnanyi’s own piano with its semi-circular, curved keyboard, is kept by the Museum of Music History, Budapest.   This extraordinary piano was produced by the Bösendorfer company and based on the designs of the Australian pianist, composer, and inventor George H. Clutsam in 1907.  With the curved keyboard, the performer’s body always remains at the same distance and angle from the lowest and highest points of the keyboard, thus minimising the need to move the body from one side to the other.   It seems the innovation was not well received by other pianists and it might just be telling about Dohnanyi that he, on the contrary, loved it and found it very easy to play on.  He used it at many of his recitals before World War I but apparently stopped using this special instrument after he had the experience of it not arriving in time for a particular concert.  He was therefore forced to use a substitute piano and consequently had some difficulty in adapting quickly to the “normal” keyboard.

You can hear this piano in the program

In the Spotlight, 11th February, 2025 at 7 pm

with pianist Sofja Gulbadamova playing solo works

for piano by Dohnanyi 

The eclectic colourfulness of Dohnanyi’s piano works is well exemplified by this selection which liberally juxtaposes Viennese melodies, Hungarian folk song arrangements and neoclassical essays. They are framed by two lighter transcriptions: one waltz from Delibes’s Coppelia, 111, and another from Johann Strauss’ the Gypsy Baron, 13 – both numbers were frequent encores of Dohnanyi’s, thanks to their brilliant artistic layout. They may give the listener a sense of Dohnanyi’s life-long adoration of the waltz. He even composed a suite of symphonic pieces which consists of four waltz movements, the Suite 0p. 39, which he later transcribed for two pianos and recorded with Edward Kilenyi for Columbia Records. Sofja Gulbadamova chose two of Dohnanyi’s loosely constructed piano cycles: Three Pieces, 0p.23 and Suite in the 0lden Style, 0p. 24. Both were written during the composer’s Berlin period, a controversial decade in his life. He was appointed as Professor at the prestigious Berlin College of Music at only 28 years old, after a number of highly successful years as a composer-pianist concertizing throughout continental Europe, and Britain.

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