The University of Wyoming’s Music Department has begun its concert series for the 2023 spring semester with the debut of a recently restored John Braodwood fortepiano from 1858.
Presenting Beethoven’s Ghostly Trio and Schumann Piano Quartet, Op. 47., audiences were given a taste of period accurate sounds from master musicians.
The Music Department gave the Sunday Matinee show, which included faculty Theresa Bogard, piano; James Przygocki, viola; Sherry Sinift, violin, and accompanied by guest cellist Hu Sisi. Sisi earned a master’s degree in Cello performance and education from The Central Conservatory of Music in China.
The audience enjoyed three movements from Piano Trio, Op. 70, No. 1 or Ghost Trio (1809) by Beethoven and Schumann’s Piano Quartet, Op. 47. (1842) in the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts’ Recital Hall.
The concert entitled “Ghostly Romanticism” explored lively, eerie pieces from that period.
Beethoven’s “Ghost Trio,” so named for its unmistakable mournful, ominous motif which builds a sense of apprehension in its audience, is thought to have been created for an opera of Shakespeare’s Macbeth which never came to fruition.
The Broadwood piano represents the style of instrument the performed pieces would have been composed on, and offered a rare chance to hear these master works as they were intended to sound by their composers.
The careful restoration process of the instrument took university piano technician, Tim Wirth, over two years to complete.
With such quick changes and sudden explosive notes in both sections of the concert, pianist Theresa Bogard explained how the Broadwood piano lent itself perfectly to the task.
“The piano is straight strung, meaning the strings don’t overlap like a modern piano. In a modern, there is more of a ringing and a dampening that you don’t get with this one. This is a really amazing piano for romantic music, the perfect piano for Chopin, Brahms, Schumann.”
“It is lighter and more reactive than a modern piano. Like driving a jaguar. The sound is thinner, so when you play you can play really soft and then really loud– suddenly!”
Bogard, a forte enthusiast who has been with the university for over a decade and won numerous awards for her performances as well as the 2008 Wyoming Professor of the year award, also described the feeling of playing such a reactive instrument.
“It is so exposed and thin that it feels like you’re dancing naked on the stage. You can get away with so much more on a modern piano.”
After the concluding Finale piece from the Schumann Piano Quartet and many encore bows, the audience was invited on stage to take a closer look at the instrument, to play it, and admire this piece of living history which has found a home in the University of Wyoming.
I wish I could have been there to hear it but the writing in this article made me feel like I was in the audience! Bravo!