Early Pianos
The 1817 Broadwood Grand Piano was the most advanced of its time. John Broadwood was a brilliant publicist. He employed the fashionably tousled young super-star Humphrey Davy as his scientific consultant. (Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution had a delirious following in London society, though he has found a soberer lasting fame as the inventor of the Miner’s Safety Lamp.) Broadwood’s greatest publicity coup still resounds today. He made an unsolicited present of a piano to Beethoven. That piano still exists, in a Viennese Museum. The instrument in Norris’s Keyboard Collection is within one hundred serial numbers of it. Only one closer match still exists, and that’s in the Beethoven House in Bonn.
Norris has recorded Beethoven Piano Sonatas on the instrument. With Monica Huggett, he has performed several cycles of the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas. He also uses it to accompany Mark Wilde in Beethoven Scottish songs, and Philip Langridge in Schubert’s Winterreise.
See Picture Gallery
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