Pianos

Federal marshals seized a grand piano and an aged Rolls-Royce on Thursday from the Encino home of entertainer Michael Jackson's parents to satisfy part of a $1.3-million default judgment. "This is a tempest in a teapot," said Brian Oxman, attorney for Joseph and Katherine Jackson. He said the seizure was illegal because the couple were not served with court papers before the default judgment was obtained. Besides, he said, "the piano belongs to Michael, not his parents.

It came with us always. First the old upright, then the Baldwin, then the Steinway grand, no matter how often we moved, or how far - she'd no more have left it behind than she'd have left me. There was, in those days, much shouting and storming about, the screeching of tires as my father sped off in the night. When I was 10, they split up for good, and we landed near Palo Alto, where my mother was left, a single mother in the suburbs, in her 40s, in the 1950s, a decade that did not take kindly to divorcees.

Like stately ocean liners about to set sail, the grand pianos roll down an assembly line of craftsmen, black, elegant and silent. The instruments, a marriage of ancient wood and high-tech engineering, have a mission: Prove that Japan can make a world-class, luxury piano fine enough to challenge the gold standard of the music industry--the Steinway grand piano. It is an audacious gambit for their maker, the Kawai Musical Instrument Manufacturing Co.

Will the Academy's big bubble pop before it has a chance to be built? Italian architect Renzo Piano, Los Angeles architect Zoltan Pali and officials from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled preliminary designs Thursday for a $300-million film museum at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The architectural centerpiece of the 290,000-square-foot complex, just west of the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would be a giant glass-enclosed dome, which Piano refers to as the "sphere" and the "soap bubble.

As Lisa Boone reports this week, more recession-battered homeowners are trying to sell their furnishings for cash. So many pianos are hitting the auction market you may be able to pick one up for as little as $500. (See story above.) The acoustic piano's waning popularity in U.S. households -- the subject of the Home section's May 16 centerpiece cover story -- prompted much reaction from readers lamenting the decline.

Wen Yu Shen, 18, of Taiwan won the $30,000 top prize at the Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition, a two-week event that concluded Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Competitors from Russia took the next three awards: Andrei Korobeinikov, 18, won the $20,000 second-place prize, Sofya Gulyak, 25, the $15,000 third-place prize and Denis Evstuhin, 26, the $10,000 finalist prize. Thirty contestants, ages 18 to 30, from around the world competed in the event. * Chris Pasles

The piano used in the film "Casablanca" -- the one on which Dooley Wilson played "As Time Goes By" -- will be onstage tonight and Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl for the "Mediterranean Blue: From Fireworks to Fado" concerts with conductor John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Valued at more than $2.5 million and owned by Beverly Hills dentist Gary Milan, the salmon-colored piano will be played in the Suite from "Casablanca" by composer Max Steiner.

There are still a few American products in a class all their own. Listen, for instance, to the special timbre of Steinway pianos, favored by concert pianists worldwide. Just don't listen too closely. The next time you hear a Steinway, it could be one mass-produced in Japan. Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing Co. has just announced that it will soon begin designing and manufacturing upright and grand pianos for Waltham, Mass.-based Steinway Musical Properties Inc.

Where art and commerce meet, there may be a profit. That seems to be the hope of Steinway Musical Properties, which this week introduced in New York and here in the City of Orange, the products of its new, fourth subsidiary, the Boston Piano Co. "Designed by Steinway & Sons," and manufactured at a plant in Ryuyo, Japan, the new line of instruments--not including, incidentally, a concert grand--promises much for the so-called mid-price range, the range below the cost of a Steinway.

Don't call it a player piano. To Terry Lewis at Yamaha Corp. of America, it's a Mark II Disklavier, and it's the last great hope of the piano industry. Piano sales have been sinking for more than a decade. Changing musical tastes, cuts in school budgets for music instruction, the popularity of inexpensive electronic keyboards and tough competition for home entertainment dollars during the recession share the blame. But the Disklavier, Lewis said, is beginning to change that tune.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. - The piano was delivered to its bluff-top perch under cover of fog nearly two weeks ago. It is scheduled to leave this coastal enclave in a burst of flames on Sunday. In between the fog and the fire, musician and sculptor Mauro Ffortissimo has been treating his neighbors to an illicit outdoor concert series grandly dubbed Sunset Piano. Chopin, Debussy, a tango or two. The performances are timed to end the moment the sun sinks below the horizon. He plays to cyclists and dog walkers, babies in strollers, his landlady in a folding chair, the charmed, the perplexed.

Few musicians have forged a closer professional and personal collaboration than that of conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and pianist Yefim Bronfman. Their regular appearances together performing concertos from the standard repertory have captivated audiences for some 20 years, first during Salonen's 17-season tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and more recently while he's been principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. But that relationship broadened six years ago, when Bronfman gave the premiere of Salonen's Piano Concerto, written for the soloist and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

This story has been updated. See below. Few things are more carefully choreographed than a movie musical, but director Tom Hooper wanted to steep his big-screen adaptation of "Les Misérables" in some gritty reality. So he took a page from Ridley Scott's war film "Black Hawk Down. " At Pinewood Studios outside London, he set up a scene in which 30 student revolutionaries and scores of background players construct a blockade to stave off the French army in 19th century Paris.

Hours before showtime at UCLA's Royce Hall, Teri Meredyth leaned into a new Steinway & Sons concert grand piano. Behind her, stagehands hammered together a stage extension. In front, workers shoved into place wooden panels for a backdrop. Stage left, an electrician shouted to a colleague aiming spotlights. Meredyth, the hall's longtime piano technician, pounded the keys of the 9-foot-long grand, listening for off-kilter harmonics. She tweaked tuning pins and pricked felt hammers with a needle to soften them and thus warm the tone that would be produced when they hit the strings.

The piano on which Sam (Dooley Wilson) played the haunting love song "As Time Goes By" in the 1942 Oscar-winning movie classic "Casablanca" is going on the auction block. Sothebys in New York will put the iconic instrument up for sale on Dec. 14. The auction house believes the piano could fetch up to $1.2 million. The Japanese collector who is offering the instrument bought it at a 1988 Sotheby's auction for $154,000. "Casablanca," which starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as lovers Rick and Isla, celebrated the 70th anniversary of its New York premiere Monday.

Vasily Petrenko is a slender, stylish Russian conductor dashing enough for Hollywood - he could have easily have pranced on camera in “Anna Karenina.” As an unknown 30-year-old in 2006, he took over the struggling Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, not a glamorous post. Now he is a local hero who has made Merseyside into Shostakovich central. Unfortunately, Petrenko has become associated with a limited Russian repertory, something not about to stop, what with the deserved popularity of his growing Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich discographies.

The grand piano of late cabaret singer Bobby Short sold for $132,000 in an auction of his personal effects, auction house Christie's said. The piano, a 1971 black lacquer Bechstein kept in Short's Manhattan apartment, had a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $40,000. A monogrammed Cartier silver ice bucket sold for $18,000 and an Art Deco wrought iron fire screen brought $12,000, the auction house said.

YANGON, Myanmar - Ko Paul had been warned that the old Yamaha piano in the upstairs sitting room of the dilapidated lakeside mansion was in bad shape. Tropical climates aren't great for pianos. Heat warps their sound boxes, humidity swells their pin blocks, reducing string tension, and termites savor an easy meal. But this one was worse than the piano tuner expected that day in 2009. "Pretty much everything had to be changed, the pins, the dampers, all the hammers," he said in a coffee shop in Yangon.

Conlon Nancarrow grew up listening to a player piano in his Arkansas home. In 1948, indebted to Henry Cowell's suggestion that difficult rhythms and simultaneous multiple tempos could easily be achieved on a player piano, he went to New York and bought one, along with a hole-punching machine to cut the piano rolls. The approximately 50 rhythmically intricate “Studies for Player Piano” he subsequently produced - many are indeed unplayable by human hands - were regarded by composers like Cage and Ligeti as a kind of 20th century “Well-Tempered Clavier.” On Tuesday, Piano Spheres gave Nancarrow, who would have turned 100 last Saturday (he died in 1997)