I know just the thing. While everyone else was stocking up on GPS-guided gizmos – this Christmas’s big thing, as we now consider an American military satellite essential for getting the car safely home from work or jogging round the park without ending up on the wrong planet – I was looking for a more traditional, long-lasting present for my family: a piano.
A small grand piano, elegantly curvy, in wood that wouldn’t look too overwhelmingly dark in a smallish room, an instrument with a mellow sound that would soothe rather than shock if anyone really began to pound away at the Moonlight Sonata or Für Elise, that wouldn’t go out of tune once a fortnight, would encourage my offspring to play, but wouldn’t cost a fortune.
Easy though this might sound, it wasn’t. No trustworthy friend turned up with one to sell. And buying a used piano from a stranger is, I was soon told, just as difficult and dangerous as buying a used car. It’s only too easy to end up with an expensive wreck, the pianistic equivalent of a vehicle which drinks a pint of oil a day, whose exhaust is falling off and whose brakes have inexplicably just stopped working.
Still, after six months of trying, I now know everything about the dark art of buying pianos in London. If a piano is what rings your bell (and it’s been a great success in our house where we can all now play almost all carols on at least one finger), this is how.
Unless you have enough money to buy the better class of BMW without bothering about the price tag, don’t bother nipping into Steinways. New Steinway grands (small), on offer at a cut-price sale at a girl’s school in the North sometime this autumn would have cost me from £28,000.
If you want the guidance of an expert and the comfort of shop premises, you could try kindly Marksons in Regent’s Park, where they’ll not only sell or rent you new pianos, but even steer you towards modestly priced second-hand ones.
Otherwise have the adventure: hunt down a piano on your own. If you live in a Zone of Unusual Refinement – Hampstead, say, or Kensington – you just might try answering ads in shop windows and local papers. But treat them with caution. Even if the instrument more or less works, there are almost certain to be problems. My parents, for instance, once bought an old upright piano (a 19th-century Steinway, with wonderfully ostentatious candle-holders and high Victorian latticework lined with green silk), from a friend whose musician mother had just died. It was a snip at £100. But what they didn’t realise until the movers arrived was that the old lady had kept 62 Pekinese dogs which had attacked the piano in every possible way: generations of puppies had sharpened their teeth on its majestic claw feet and layers of ancient dog poo had stuck it to the floor so the movers had to prise it up with a crowbar.
Forget eBay. Unless you’re just going to use your piano to keep aspidistras on, you need to know what it sounds like. The most exciting way to buy is at an in-person piano auction. For two nights, anyone who wants can wander into a hall in central London and sit down and try out hundreds of pianos of all shapes and sizes and ages and appearances and conditions. On the third day, you bid, then you have to pay and arrange to get your piano moved within a day and, hey presto, you’re sorted.
Except, how can you possibly tell which of the pretty bits of furniture you’re eyeing up, all slightly out-of-tune, are what they seem – nice old gels suffering after a period of neglect – and which are disguised disasters?
My father (a musician) told me more than a decade ago about the piano auctions in a hall in Red Lion Square, filled with cartoon musician characters in white tie and tails (or Oxfam coat and Dr Who woolly scarf), each throwing himself into a pale, sweaty, bravura performance of some impossible bit of show-off Liszt, each lost in his passion for the musical muse, ignoring his multiple mirror images all around. Nothing would have persuaded me not to go.
He went pale with horror when I said I was actually planning to buy there. “But you need to be able to tell whether the sound board is cracked,” he said, discouragingly. This is the board under the strings that make the piano’s notes sound; the strings vibrate against it. “If it’s cracked, the notes won’t hold their tune. But only an expert can tell. You won’t know until you find you’ve bought a piano you can’t tune.” Or ir might be the wrest plank underneath, more crack-prone, and still more impossible to check out without years of esoteric training.
“You need an expert,” he said. But how to get one? Piano experts, it seems, are in short supply. One friend knew a girl who knew a man who might know something about restoring harpsichords; another man definitely knew an expert, but something about the delicate state of his marriage meant we couldn’t bring ourselves to call on his expertise; and time was running out.
In the end my dad remembered the man he’d bought his own piano from. “It was years ago,” he said (and sure enough the number began 071); “he might be dead.” The expert wasn’t dead at all. He was alive and well and charming. He would be delighted to accompany me to an auction. But, if I thought an auction too ambitious (and by now I was getting nervous that it would be crowded with musical Arthur Daleys, all rubbing gleeful hands at the sight of me) I might be interested to know that he’d also just had a call from a woman in Clapham who wanted to sell a small baby grand, elegantly curvy, in wood that wouldn’t look too dark in a smallish room, with a mellow sound, that wouldn’t go out of tune once a fortnight, would encourage my offspring to play, but wouldn’t cost a fortune. It might be just right for me.
It was. I bought it. It’s been great. The friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend thing always works. But I still went to the piano auction a week later, just to see what it was like. It was just as I’d imagined: a great hall full of gleaming pianos and romantic cartoon characters in white tie and tails (or Oxfam coats and Dr Who woolly scarves), each throwing himself into a pale, sweaty, bravura performance of some impossible bit of show-off Liszt. Not an Arthur Daley in sight. The auctions take place every three months, at Conway Hall in Holborn, home of the Ethical Society. The catalogue is full of helpful ads for restorers, movers, tuners and French polishers. Next time I need a piano, I’m going to have the courage to buy one there. If you've got a Christmas windfall, I advise you to do the same. Just make sure you knit a Dr Who scarf and learn the Liszt first.
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