Hours before showtime at UCLA's Royce Hall, Teri Meredyth leaned into a new Steinway & Sons concert grand piano.
Behind her, stagehands hammered together a stage extension. In front, workers shoved into place wooden panels for a backdrop. Stage left, an electrician shouted to a colleague aiming spotlights.
Meredyth, the hall's longtime piano technician, pounded the keys of the 9-foot-long grand, listening for off-kilter harmonics. She tweaked tuning pins and pricked felt hammers with a needle to soften them and thus warm the tone that would be produced when they hit the strings.
Amid the commotion, Meredyth struggled to hear the notes.
"I want the pianist to really enjoy what they're playing," she said. "If the piano is not helping them or something is going out of tune or the voicing is uneven, they get worried and don't have their best performance."
Getting a new piano — even a brilliant Steinway — performance-ready takes time.
Meredyth was tuning and voicing the piano for the third time in two days. That evening, Jeffrey Kahane, music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, would perform the kinetic piano solo in George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."
Kahane had helped select the concert grand. He had performed on it in October, playing Ravel's jazz-infused Piano Concerto in G. Gershwin's original jazz band arrangement of "Rhapsody" would be an even bigger test of the piano the Royce Hall crew calls Sapphire.
Royce Hall began its quest for a big-sounding piano in 2010. Its first and only choice was a Steinway, a make dating to 1853 favored by such immortals as Gershwin, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Duke Ellington.
For many years, Royce Hall had relied upon Steinways its staff had affectionately named Diamond, Silver and Ruby. When the hall closed for renovation after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the school sold Diamond and Silver, and kept Ruby, a workhorse built in 1983, for jazz and solo work.
For classical concerts with elite performers, the 1,800-seat Royce Hall rented Steinways. Eventually, the hall realized that having its own showcase piano could entice more great artists to perform there.
In September 2011, when Kristy Edmunds arrived as the executive and artistic director of the hall's performing arts series, selecting a Steinway was at the top of her to-do list. A grant and donations would cover the $128,000 cost.
She enlisted four experts, including Kahane and Meredyth. They met that November at the Steinway plant in Long Island City, N.Y.
Meredyth and a Steinway representative in Los Angeles had told factory workers what Royce Hall's lively acoustics demanded: a piano with great tone and depth, color, projection and what musicians call "sustain," which refers to how long the tone keeps sounding once a key has been played. Longer is better.
It takes 140 workers about a year to assemble a piano from rock maple, Sitka and white spruce, sugar pine, mahogany, birch and poplar. The results leave abundant room for chance. Every Steinway's sound is unique.
Steinway assembly workers detected the qualities that would best suit Royce Hall in the piano that bore factory serial number 590993 on the cast-iron plate above the keyboard. They placed it first in a line of half a dozen Model D concert grands inside the factory selection room.
The pianos looked like giant ravens, each with a raised wing. Kahane moved from bench to bench, playing the opening bars of Franz Schubert's virtuosic Sonata in B-flat major. The work is by turns turbulent and dreamy, and he wanted to hear and feel how each piano handled the subtle gradations of touch it demanded.
Piano No. 590993, in particular, had a lively response to his fingers and produced a rich, deep, clear tone. Kahane kept returning to it, impressed by its range of nuance and color, its ability to express passages from soft and tender to rip-roaring. "It was love at first sound," he said.
Soon after, Steinway factory workers tuned the concert grand and removed the legs and pedals. They sealed the cabinet in a foil bag, encased the bag in cardboard, placed the pieces in a wooden crate and loaded them onto an 18-wheeler to begin the cross-country journey to the piano's new home.
In October, UCLA threw a dinner party for Sapphire on the Royce stage. One hundred guests paid as much as $25,000 to dine on pumpkin-carrot soup and salmon; the proceeds will be used to commission work from emerging musicians.
Royce Hall's quest for a big-sounding piano ends on a high note
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Royce Hall's quest for a big-sounding piano ends on a high note
