Piano legend Sergei Rachmaninov called it “the best instrument in town”— Carleton music professor James Wright said, and he couldn’t agree more.
A 1913 Steinway grand piano, donated to Carleton by the Southam family, was moved last month from the Carleton University Arts Gallery (CUAG) to the fifth floor of the MacOdrum library.
The 1200-pound piano was hauled by nine professional piano movers. A library staff member said one of the movers told her it was the biggest job they’d ever done.
Steinways made in the early 20th century were “particularly fine instruments,” because the metal bars over the sounding board were placed in a way that gave the piano a unique resonance, music professor Elaine Keillor said.
Wright said the Steinway “captures the flavour of an era”— Ottawa at the turn of the 20th century.
He said Ottawa was conveniently located between Montreal and Toronto on the concert circuit, and musicians such as Rachmaninov, Arthur Rubinstein, Bill Evans, and Nikolai Medtner often found themselves in Hamilton Southam’s drawing room, fingers itching to play on the priceless piano.
The Southams gladly indulged this desire. As Wright’s research on the Steinway discovered, the Southams were a prominent arts family since the days of Hamilton’s grandfather, William, who was the original owner of the piano.
Before MacOdrum, the piano was originally destined for the music department. It was too big to be moved up the Loeb elevator, however, so a Spanish professor kept it at his house until the opening of CUAG, Keillor said.
The piano’s move to the fifth floor comes in preparation for the December opening of the Jacob Siskind Music Reference Centre at the library.
An insert in this year’s Ottawa Chamberfest program called the resource centre a place to research, listen, and play with the university’s music holdings.
A large portion of the holdings are the material portion of music critic and journalist Jacob Siskind’s estate, which were donated to Carleton in 2011, according to a Carleton news release.
The estate is reported to include 20,000 LPs, 8,000 CDs, 3,000 78 RPM records, and archival material such as taped interviews, notes, books, clippings, and study scores.
Wright said Siskind was a classical pianist who taught at McGill and then found his calling as a music critic at the Montreal Gazette and finally the Ottawa Citizen.
When he died, his financial estate was gifted to Chamberfest and his material possessions were passed on to Carleton, Wright said.
Wright said it only seemed appropriate that a piano with such a storied history be around the corner from the Siskind Centre.
Two Carleton musicians will perform on the Steinway at the centre’s December opening, Wright said.
One is Suren Barry, a Carleton music program grad who’s helping catalogue Siskind’s collection this summer.
The other is Mauro Bertoli, an associate piano professor at Carleton.
Wright said the Steinway will not be featured at Ottawa Chamberfest, “but there’s always next year.”
