The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces by Susan Tomes

There was a time when just about every household you knew had a piano in the living room. In some cases, it was simply a musty heirloom of likely questionable quality, unused, unloved, destined eventually for the knacker’s yard.

Where it still functioned, though, it could be the life and soul of the home, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of persistent practising like a throbbing, omnipresent cog in the cacophonous domestic production line. Not surprisingly, the piano in Susan Tomes’ home is a symbol of pleasurable industry. It’s what has informed her long career as a concert pianist. And it’s what she’s most often successfully reflected upon in a series of personable books, the latest of which is The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces.

Her starting point is the prepiano age, or at least those Baroque and Classical époques – Bach to Haydn and Mozart – in which the emerging fortepiano, with its more flexible hammer action, took time to assert precedence over the plucked-string harpsichord.

Which gives Tomes perfect licence to open on thoughts of Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations, and to explain the still-delicate tonal nuances

Mozart or Haydn were faced with on fortepiano, compared with the weightier expansion and construction adjustments that fed the passions of Beethoven and the ensuing Romantic onslaught.

All this could become heavy going in a writing style that flits between historical context and programme note-style analysis, but we have Tomes’ decision to include pieces that “involve piano” – sonatas with