TWEAKING THE IVORIES
Mike Derrett works on one of around 50 pianos made by Bolton Abbey-based Cavendish Pianos a year. The company is the last remaining commercial manufacturer of traditional pianos in the country, in an industry deemed to be critically endangered.
MANY OF history’s greatest composers, including Chopin, Liszt and J.C. Bach, owned and played British pianos.
In the golden age of piano making Britain boasted 360 piano makers who supplied the entire globe.
However this great industry has now all but disappeared, leaving Cavendish Pianos, based at Bolton Abbey, in North Yorkshire, the last remaining commercial manufacturer of traditional pianos in the country.
Around 50 pianos are made every year by pooling the skills of a series of small businesses, each with their own speciality, including piano builders, to stringers and cabinet-makers.
Many of the components they use are also made in Britain. The string-makers, for example, have learned the specialised skill of hand winding piano strings. The company says a high-grade hammer and British-made strings and design gives its pianos a “distinctive classic, European tone ... a far cry from the harsh Japanese tone of many mass-produced pianos.”
Each piano has 20,000 parts and Adam Cox, who runs the company with his wife Charlie, says there is alchemy in their manufacture: “It is just wood, just leather, felt and metal and if you put them together in a particular way you have something that sings and makes music and I find that quite extraordinary really.”
Piano-making is on the Heritage Crafts Association’s so-called “Red List of Endangered Crafts”, meaning it is in danger of becoming extinct, along with flute making, scissor making and horse collar making.