Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Fazioli vs Bosendorfer

I'm not that was exactly the comment made earlier but I experienced this effect just a couple of weekends ago when playing a Grotrian Steinweg upright. The (very nice indeed) Grotrian had nowhere near the power and dynamic range of our K800, and neither does the K800 only play loud or very soft either, but within its range it was easier and more predictable to pick a dynamic and hit it with the Grotrian the the Kawai. Their actions felt very different as well but that's another story.

I appreciate everyone’s opinions. In the end, this is a personal preference. The Fazioli I played just didn’t have the personality that I’m looking for. In fact, a high end Yamaha that I played sounded more interesting to me than the Fazioli. And the Bosendorfer blew away everyone else. It just had character. Difficult to put into words. When I look at the Bosendorfer, I don’t see a piano. I see a living creature with its own idiosyncratic colorful spirit.

This post shows the difficulty almost everyone, including me, has describing a piano's tone. Words like "personality", "interesting", "character", have no more meaning than "I liked it".

It is on the same level as explaining , flavors. Impossible because of how people experience things based on previous experiences.

It would be hard to pick two high end pianos that are more dissimilar.

IMO Bluthner is more dissimilar to Fazioli than is Bosendorfer. IMO Steinway is more dissimilar to Bosendorfer than is Fazioli.

I think you are probably more familiar with and better at describing tone than most. Could you give us brief descriptions of or compare/contrast the tone of as many of the six "iconic" makes from Fine's list as you'd like? Thanks.

If we considered the very top brands in tone and similarities, maybe we could draw a kind of tonal spectrum ranging from warm/lyrical to brighter? I give it a try (and I am very serious on this one ;-)
... well, of course a warm voiced Bechstein could change the position with a hard Blüthner, so let´s just take the company´s philosophy

Warm/lyrical ---> bright

Blüthner Bösendorfer Steingraeber Fazioli Shigeru-Kawai Steinway Yamaha C. Bechstein

What do you think? Which brands would you like to add? M&H, New York Steinway, Stuart, Seiler, Förster, ...

Oy.....that is a tough ask. When you add the context of repertoire and the type of player it really gets difficult. Some of those pianos thrive under a light touch and choke when pushed to hard. Some players know how to play a piano to make it sound its best and other players only know one way to play and if the piano suits them it is good and if it doesn't suit them it sounds crummy.

And that goes for great pianists and beginners as well. Finally, some pianists sound right on some pianos only in certain repertoire.

Don't get me started on how some pianos are more flexible with how they can be voiced and others only really work well with a certain type of voicing.

I guess the bottom line is everyone should have several pianos!

Agreed

It’s trying to describe something Objectively, that’s Subjectively interpreted, with words that can mean different things to different people


~Lucubrate

My Bosendorfer 214 VC was delivered today and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Congratulations!

Congrats cozmopak!

Love the Decisiveness


~Lucubrate

Neat. I hope you get a long lifetime of enjoyment from it!

It was not a difficult decision! I wished I had had the opportunity to play a Steingraeber, as everything I’ve read about those instruments makes me think that I would have enjoyed it.

Congrats and wishing you many years of inspiration from it. The handful of times I've played the 214 VC, I loved the tone and touch. Fantastic piano !

Congrats! Should last a lifetime or more. When we bought our 225 35 years ago, Boesendorfer was owned by Kimball. They didn't interfere with Boesendorfer either, although they did make their own Kimball based on some of the Boesendorfer principles. We saw a map of the world in the factory in Wiener Neustadt, and there is was a pin showing the location of the major Boesendorfer offices. One I thought was wrong - the pin said Jasper - and it was in Indiana, not in Canada. Jasper, Indiana was the home of Kimball Pianos. After World War II, Boesendorfer was bought by Kimball in 1966 who owned it until 2002 when an Austrian Bank bought it. In 2007 it was sold to Yamaha. It has always been a small company, and after the war (being located in Vienna meant the Nazi's invaded and controlled Austria (remember the escape scene at the end of Sound of Music). So after the war, the production of pianos dropped to a very low level. I saw a table of the production numbers and in the 1950's I remember that there were years where 50 odd pianos were built. Even today, only a few hundred pianos are built per year. So I think Boesendorfer may have been bought by Kimball and then Yamaha for its prestigious name and quality of instruments, rather than as a big money maker acquisition.

That is an advantage that wine lovers have over us. They have spent hundreds of years coming up with comparative language that means something to most people, even those who have never seriously tasted wine. It is admittedly more difficult with musical sound though. Someone famous once said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."


Bravo cozmopak! This is a great instrument and I am certain that you will enjoy it for a lifetime.

Enjoy discovering its abilities, and congratulations.

Maybe start by making a list of 5-7 words that describe tone, arrange them like the petals of a flower, then adjust the size of each petal for each piano. Your scale says Bechstein has a long bright petal and Bluthner a short one.

It's a standard sort of diagram for representing attributes - I've forgotten where I last saw one. Does one already exist for pianos, I wonder?

Google for "petal diagram" for examples.