A RESONANCE OF GREATNESS

By Gary Graffman

Photograph By C. Bruce Forster

Connoisseur Magazine March 1982

Mark Allen, a former piano tuner, aims to build the world's most perfect concert grand. And, according to our expert, he may well succeed.

Just across the East River from Manhattan, along the busy route to La Guardia Airport, is a tranquil working-class neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, that once appeared on the maps as Steinway Village. A traveler can still emerge from the Steinway Street subway station, hop onto a Steinway Transit Line bus, and ride past the Steinway Brauhall, the Steinway Hand Laundry, the Steinway Bake Shop, and the Steinway Auto Parts Company, eventually to arrive at a cul-de-sac known as Steinway Place. There sprawls the rambling Steinway Piano Factory, home of "The Standard Piano of the World." A bustling hub, it houses some 500 employees, most of whom, like so many white-coated Nibelungen, intently hammer, file, whittle, and polish metal, felt, wood - and, in recent years, Plastic - to the constant hum and clank of whirring machinery.

As a concert pianist, I have on many occasions visited a modest room in this factory, seeking as ever the ideal piano - which is not unlike searching for the Holy Grail. For a concert performer, there is always the important matter of his or her individual preference for certain characteristics, which may be manifested more by one piano than another. The idiosyncrasies I look for include an extremely deep, resonant, and almost angry-sounding bass, a rich middle register with a viola like quality, and a treble that combines this richness with a shimmering sound that is almost like a vibrant "ping." This is a tall order, and it is rare to find an instrument in perfect condition with all those attributes. However, miracles do happen on occasion. And while I have been known to complain vociferously about the Steinway instrument or their condition, for me, the Steinway is and always has been the piano with the greatest range of possibilities.

Recently, on the other side of the continent, not far from the Columbia River, where salmon struggle upstream to lay their eggs, I visited another piano factory, one as different from the Steinway headquarters as is a birch bark wigwam from the Chrysler Building. It consists of two good-sized rooms in a nondescript warehouse in Portland, Oregon.

In one room are the machinery and tools of a piano maker, assorted old wrecks of pianos, and, against one wall, its clean new wood luminous amid the clutter, the skeleton of a half-built concert grand piano. In the other room there is less machinery, a few more instruments, and one finished, gleaming, concert-size ( nine feet long ) instrument with gold-leaf fleurs-de-lis on its legs, a burled-walnut interior, the legend "Built for the Masters" emblazoned across its soundboard, and - on the outer case, in letters easily readable from the rear of a large auditorium - the name of its maker: Mark Allen.

Mark Allen? Although by far most professional pianists play the Steinway, they are familiar with instruments manufactured by Baldwin, Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Blüthner, Knabe, Yamaha, Mason and Hamlin, Erard, Plryrl, Chickering, Heintzmann, Kawai, Gaveau, Grotrian Steinweg, August Förster, Petrov, Estonia, and even Red October. But the name Mark Allen has yet to penetrate the pianistic consciousness.

Mark Allen, 41, a loner with a Grant Wood face and the quiet tenacity of a Jamestown settler, is a throwback to the era of hand craftsmanship and pride in one's work. For the past decade he has been building concert-size pianos from scratch virtually by himself. His output to date: two and a half. Supremely confident, he charges custom-built prices: $50,000 per instrument ( as compared to $60,000 concert Bösendorfer or $27,000 and $35,000 respectively for equivalent U.S.- or German-made Steinways).

Allen, who served his piano-building apprenticeship during the early 1960's, speaks with the quiet intensity of a man on a mission. "I came to build a concert grand because I spent all my adult life working with pianists," he explains in his Virginia drawl, "and I in my own way became a connoisseur of this thing, the piano. And I decided what the ultimate instrument was. It was a even balanced scale. It was a homogenocity of sound. It must be inobtrusive and subtle when you want it so, and powerful and brawny when you want that. It was a piano the would have the singing quality of the human voice-and I personally prefer the contralto sound-so I built this piano using the voice of Kathleen Ferrier as my model, because she was always my ideal of a singer."

I could wait no longer to get familiar with the instrument and sat down at its ivory and ebony keyboard ( a rare enough sight in these days of plastic ) to learn for myself. It was soon apparent that I was playing an excellent piano, lovingly crafted. Allen had indeed accomplished what he had set out to do. The piano spoke with an unusually balanced voice, a lovely singing tone, and, I admitted, a delicious "homogenocity" of sound.

Allen responded to my enthusiasm modestly. "I want to point out," he said, "that I don't consider to have built the piano all by myself at all. I started with 150, 200 years of heritage, of many minds, of brilliant people who worked hard over it, and I looked at all the past technology. It was a historical progression of the art, and 25 or 50 years from now somebody should come down the road and outdo Mark Allen. The point is that whoever comes along is going to have the chance to look at what I tried out and see whether it worked or it didn't."

A piano's curse is that it is a percussion instrument; a pianist's curse is the unending and unwinnable battle to minimize this basic characteristic. Only a few great Steinways have I felt almost as if I were playing on a stringed instrument- as if it were possible even to make a crescendo on a single note. This was of course illusory. But illusion and fantasy are the ingredients that make a performance soar; and something within an inspiring instrument-or within my imagination, when the sound of an instrument inspires me-allows me to lose myself completely in the music when I am seated at such a piano.

A finished piano adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. But the fact remains of the same components: cast-iron frames, pinblocks, keyboards, strings, hammers, repetition mechanisms, soundboards. Most manufacturers order the majority of their components, designed to their own specifications, from a small group of suppliers, each of whom specializes in one or another of these parts. ( To my knowledge, only Yamaha of Japan-the same firm that makes the motorcycles-is self-sufficient in this respect.)

The Mark Allen piano is also made to unique specifications. On all standard pianos, for example, the tremendous tension produced by the stretching of the strings is approximately equal throughout the keyboard. Not so on the Allen, where tension, which affects a piano's volume and sustaining power, is graduated from 72 kilograms at the top ( treble ) to 138 kilograms at the bottom ( bass ). "No one built a piano like that before," he states. Then there is the soundboard, where there are unique little auxiliary wooden ribs that run from the middle of the treble to the bass end. "I found very conclusively that these would increase the power of the piano and its color," he maintains. To Steinway, creator of "The Instrument of the Immortals," Mark Allen sends forth this challenge: "I can make any Steinway, by replacing its sounding board, better that the original maker did. I dare anyone to ask me to do it. I have done it many times."

But competition with Steinway is not what drives Mark Allen. "I only do this because I'm crazy in the first place," he observes sanely. "And I would be very miserable not doing it, so I have no choice. It's my thing."

Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Allen began to learn about cabinet-making from an uncle when still a teenager. After a two-year apprenticeship he moved to Washington, D.C., where and interest in music led him to take piano lessons as well. This led in turn to tuning and, at the age of 25, another move north to Philadelphia, where he worked for a time as an organ builders apprentice and then as a piano tuner and repairman at Wanamaker's department store. It was there that he first heard instruments manufactured by Bösendorfer and Bechstein, and he fell in love with their "warm, intimate" sound. "The small Bechstein is the most musical piano ever built, bar none," he maintains. Allen began to dream of building his own piano, and in 1969 he drew the blueprints for the prototype and began to order parts.

By 1970 he was able to rent a shop and build his piano's case. But financial problems overwhelmed him, and when a West Coast-based religious organization offered to move him to Oregon and subsidize his venture, he accepted. The association was unhappy and short-lived. Now Allen, who married and divorced during those years, has another sponsor, an independently wealthy record producer who has offered financial assistance without strings to allow him to pursue his greatest love in peace.

He is understandably frustrated, however, at the lack of interest professional pianists have shown toward his instrument, particularly since they are known as a breed for their dissatisfaction with even the best pianos; they are constantly searching for that perfect instrument. As if to add irony to injury, Allen's workshop during his Philadelphia years was only a few doors down the street from the Academy of Music, the city's major concert hall. Although music students from the prestigious Curtis Institute nearby, as well as members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, had tried the handmade instrument and spoken highly of it, none of the major performers who came to play at the Academy showed any interest in visiting the workshop.

"You know, there was no real initiative, no curiosity whatsoever," Allen recalls. "It just blew me away."

Nowadays things are looking up, Allen's second piano, which he believes to be a significant improvement over his prototype, has been purchased by an up-and-coming young keyboard virtuoso named Cyprian Katsirsis, who used it last fall for a Liszt digital recording with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra on the Angel label, to be released in June. A more distinguished launching pad ( for Katsirsis as well as the piano ) can hardly be imagined. And the consensus of those present at the recording session was that the piano did indeed sound lovely.

Since this was not a concert-hall performance but a recording session using sophisticated sound equipment, the piano's volume cannot be accurately judged. While Allen's instrument has been heard in recital in smallish auditoriums -Alice Tully Hall in New York City's Lincoln Center, for example- it has yet to prove that it can hold its own in a large auditorium against a behemoth orchestra such as the Philadelphia. Whether the instrument will have the brilliance to penetrate the forests of Tchaikovsky or the swamps of Rachmaninoff also remains to be heard. I voice this question not because I have doubts, but because until one tries it one cannot know.

Meanwhile it must be said that Mark Allen has succeeded on his own terms. For me the ideal piano is one that can evoke on demand not only the voice of Kathleen Ferrier, but also Chaliapin, Heifetz, Casals, Rampal, Barry Tuckwell, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and, when called for, a squadron of dive-bombers. But as Allen makes it abundantly clear, that is by no means his goal. He is thinking not in terms of what he describes variously as the Steinway's "aggressive tone," "roughness of scale," and "harmonic garbage," but rather of the "musical" Bechstein and Bösendorfer. ("Aha! What he wants is that mushy European sound!" counters a Steinway representative cheerfully.) The preference for one sound quality over another is personal and not at all the point. What is important is, Mark Allen's vision, second, that he is producing a first-class instrument, and third, that he will undoubtedly continue to do even better.