The piano manufacturer Steingraeber & Söhne will exhibit at the Musikmesse trade fair in Frankfurt in 2018. We will present all of our upright and grand piano models. Come and visit us!
The Bayreuth piano company Steingraeber & Söhne can look back at an astonishingly good year in 2017 and feels well equipped for 2018. We look forward to the Piano Salon Europe in new Hall 11, where Steingraeber will present three innovations in booth B10.
After a two and a half year development process, the first Steingraeber Transducer Grand Piano will be unveiled in Frankfurt. During the test phase, the first orders already came in from Tehran. That’s because, with a click of the computer mouse, this grand can be freely tuned – and this includes non-Western temperaments. It goes without saying that all historical temperaments are available. This promising innovation is therefore a logical addition to Steingraeber’s other ones, the Sordino Pedal and Mozart Rail. These two innovations were presented to a large audience at the 2016 Music Trade Fair. As a result, the Duisburg Konzertsaal of the Folkwang University of Music in Essen has acquired a grand piano with these features. To an increasing extent, pianists work out their unique interpretations with the help of recording options that Steingraeber makes available to them in a great variety of ways. Customizable piano sounds are an important part of this exciting zeitgeist.
Needless to say, we’ve also outfitted our Transducer Grand Piano with every electronic option in existence, whether for the authentic reproduction of quarter tone music from the 1920s, for use in pop music, as a booster for open air performances, or even for contemporary experimental electronic music as composer HP Platz has shown in performances of his work, Branenwelten, on the Steingraeber grand piano with IRCAM, at the Vienna University of Music for the preliminary stages of the now completed project at the VdM Kongress in Stuttgart, and at Mondomusica in Cremona.
Steingraeber & Söhne has entrusted the sound engineers from the experimental studio of the broadcaster “SWR” in Freiburg with the installation of the final version. From October 2017 to February 2018, the sound engineers and physicists at the experimental studio of the SWR in Freiburg have worked on the new Steingraeber grand piano, in order to equip it with additional transducers – there are now 5 such grands – and to optimize it with audio crossovers. Sounds are chosen from Pianoteq’s (company Modartt) new physical modelling, which came from a Steingraeber E-272 Concert Grand.
At the Frankfurt Music Trade Fair, the Steingraeber & Söhne booth will be situated directly at the entrance to the Piano Salon. That’s where we’ll present all five grand piano and all three upright piano models, and visitors can try out two technical innovations on these instruments. Steingraeber & Söhne have had their eye on young professionals since 1991, the year in which our most successful model, the 130 Profi Studio, was first introduced. People expressed great surprise when the 130 Profi Studio model was first introduced. A main reason for this was that Steingraeber had taken its own action components, acquired additional Renner and Yamaha components, and combined them into a single action at its factory in Bayreuth. This exceptionally fast action immediately won high praise from professionals. The Leipzig University of Music acquired twenty-two of these pianos, to cite just one example.
We wanted to upgrade this model, so Steingraeber joined forces with the Renner company in 2017 for that purpose. The results have been tested by numerous professionals, beginning at the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, and they’ve pronounced it even better than the original model. We now invite visitors to the Frankfurt Music Fair to try it out, as well. This also applies to the already well known, fully developed SFM mechanism, which, for the first time, will be available to “feel out” on the smallest Steingraeber & Söhne model: The 122 T-SFM is the third innovation at the exciting Steingraeber exhibit in Frankfurt this year.
The SFM action for upright piano 122 (left) and the new PS action for upright piano 130. (the new aluminum rail reduces the weight and increases the vibration which the pianist can feel in the fingers)
At the close of the Frankfurt Music Trade Fair on Saturday, 14 April 2018, the Steingraeber Transducer Grand Piano D-232 will be featured in a public concert with the Ensemble Modern. The 7 pm concert will take place in the very special acoustic of the hall of Kunstverein Montez at Honsellstraße 7. The sound technicians from the experimental studio of the “SWR” will be there, too, as will their extravagant electronic equipment. The Children’s Choir from the Hessischer Rundfunk will also join in.
