A famous disaster happened after the inaugural performance on a new Steinway piano purchased by the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the early 1970s. The stage hands managed to allow the piano to lurch, flip on its back, and fall down a chasm left by a descending stage elevator that was supposed to help with moving pianos.
I didn’t know, until I read THIS, that a similar thing happened at the Birmingham-Southern College Theatre. Moving pianos is tricky, as I can attest from my Samford School of Music days . . .
[Thus beginneth the anecdote.] When voice students gave their junior recitals, they would often present a joint recital (two students sharing the same program) or invite a pianist to “assist” by performing a movement (portion) of a piano concerto. This was to provide some rest for the voice, allay nerves, increase attendance, etc.
A concerto performance involved two pianos, a second pianist to play the orchestra’s part, and a page turning lackey for said second pianist (it’s hard simulating an orchestra, one gets too busy reading and playing for dear life to turn and slap pages). Such performances also enlisted the help of the “proctor” as a piano mover (above and beyond the normal duties of keeping attendance and acting as stage manager). The page turner got the honor of being a furniture mover, too.
The university recital hall had an absurdly shallow stage and a big organ (on a stage wagon) that would be left parked to one side for long periods of time, freed from the storage closet. The stage was so shallow that placing two grand pianos side-by-side would have the soloist’s piano flush with the very edge of the stage.
Now, my teacher and I had moved pianos many times for our own concerto rehearsals, so I was quite familiar and adroit with the process. But, I had never done so WITH THE DEAR ORGAN dominating stage left. No-one knew that this presence would place the pianos atop a big sagging spot or dip in the middle of the stage that had only recently gotten worse. So, when one piano was moved to the edge of the stage, it wouldn’t stay there. It would roll into the dip. Then the second piano couldn’t fit beside it. And the organ was in the way, so it was hard to get around behind the pianos and push. And there were moldings decorating the back wall of the stage that stuck out a couple of inches for piano #2 to hit and scrape.
So, one fine evening when I was enlisted as page turner for a concerto performance during a voice recital, the proctor and I discover all of the aforementioned problems as we . . .
Push, and huff, and nudge, and puff, and pull, and push, and grunt, and bump, and knock, and blush, and heave, and strain, and scrape, and force, and stop.
The audience is giggling, since our Herculean efforts have left the keyboard of one piano six inches out-of-line with its neighbor, which won’t do for the performance. So now, once again, it’s . . .
Strain, and nudge, and force, and knock, and pull, and push, and heave, and blush, and scrape, and bump, and grunt, and huff, and heave, and push, and knock.
Still giggling, the audience may have actually applauded our hard won success at finally aligning the pianos (I can’t quite remember due to embarassment).
The following week, another recital featured a half-time concerto show. I felt glad to be in the audience as the proctor, assisted by that page turner and the brother of either the singer or the pianist, got to move the pianos. Brother-man knocked a flower arrangement down and spilt water all over the organ. Giggles galore.
The following week, yet another recital. This time a half-dozen people had been conscripted to jump up out of the audience and manhandle the pianos. It was sort of like raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. It went better, but the audience still giggled.
After the first fiasco, I told my teacher what had transpired. With a gleam in his eye, he said, “You should have rolled the piano off the stage so we’d get a new one!”
