Chatham pianist laughs off Glenn Gould’s criticism of his beloved Steinway

For nearly two decades, a concert-sized Steinway piano has held a special place in Jim Prosser’s heart and home.

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But, the 67-year-old Chatham pianist and music educator only recently learned his Steinway has a connection to the late, great Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould.

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On the advice of a friend, Prosser began reading the book A Romance on Three Legs, authored by Katie Hafner, about Gould’s obsessive quest for the perfect piano.

He was surprised to read Gould tested Prosser’s piano, Steinway CD 131, on March 11, 1976 at the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto and criticized it for being heavy and sluggish and even said it was out of tune.

“I just laughed,” said Prosser, who acquired the piano on May 1, 2005. “I just thought, ‘That’s hilarious.’”

He contacted Hafner to tell her he owned CD 131 and it is not the way Gould described it.

Prosser said Hafner, who lives in San Francisco, decided to contact the Glenn Gould Foundation to see if they would be interested in her doing an interview with Prosser for a podcast, as part of the foundation’s series, The Gould Standard.

Prosser said the interview was done last April and a recording of him playing his Steinway in the front room of his home was done last summer.

The podcast was released recently on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2A91qDvuJ8&list=PLiAEmTuPXrVship-J6ihn0GKXvC3WgmJ7&index=4&t=77s

An audio recording of Gould testing CD 131 is part of the two-hour complete tapes of Glenn Gould testing various pianos in the Library and Archives Canada.

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Citing his initial impressions, Gould said in the recording, “The piano is very sluggish in terms of action. It’s very even or put it another way, it’s very evenly sluggish.”

However, Gould notes, “The bass is great, it’s probably one of the best basses I’ve ever seen. It’s quite extraordinary.”

Not knowing Gould’s connection to his piano, Prosser said, “I only bought it because I loved the sound and I loved the way it played.”

When it comes to concert pianos built by Steinway, the company keeps its best pianos in a concert fleet for artists to rent or the pianos are sent to dealers in major cities and they use them as concert instruments, he said.

Steinway gives their instruments a random serial number starting with CD, he said.

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Prosser said his CD 131 Steinway was built in 1969 and the Eaton department store previously was a Steinway dealer, showing casing pianos at the Eaton Auditorium on College Street, when Gould tested in the instrument.

Prosser, who lived and taught music in London for 25 years before moving to Chatham 20 years ago, first encountered the CD 131 Steinway while at Western University in 1986 after being invited to do a solo recital.

He tried another Steinway at Western after playing the CD 131 and he found CD 131 “so vastly superior.”

He said the piano was called the “new Steinway” when it was bought by the university around 1979-80. It was reserved for faculty and visiting artists to play, he said.

“They let me play it, which was kind of nice of them,” Prosser said.

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“Any time I played there, I wanted to play (the CD 131),” he said. “It was just magnificent instrument.”

Prosser said the Steinway was the university’s main piano well into the 1990s before a new Steinway was purchased and CD 131 was handed down for student use.

Every year, Western sells off surplus instruments and Prosser recalled mentioning to the head technician at the time, Don Stephenson, if the university had a nice seven-foot Steinway it was selling he would be interested in looking at it to buy.

Prosser was teaching piano one night when Stephenson called to ask him: “What if 131 came up for sale?”

His first thought was “That’s crazy, that’s way more piano than I need.”

Noting CD 131 is a quarter-inch shy of nine-feet long, Prosser said, “I thought, ‘Well, why not?

“It was a piano I loved playing,” he said. “I’ve never regretted it.”

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