Pianos

Jessica Shapiro, with nary a piano lesson in her 14 years, is arched over the television/piano contraption in the FAO Schwarz toy store at South Coast Plaza deftly practicing a finger exercise. "It's neat," says the Northridge teen-ager. "It's a lot better than having a teacher because kids like watching TV." For some of us, taking piano lessons is the stuff of childhood memories.

NO one paying attention to recent musical trends in Asia can have failed to notice it: The Chinese are crazy about piano playing. Among city dwellers, there's been nothing like this enthusiasm since the '80s, when an embrace of the Japanese-originated Suzuki teaching method created a national army of child violinists.

When Matthew Strandberg began piano lessons four years ago, he was so shy that when someone spoke to him he would look down at his shoes. Today, the 9-year-old is still bashful, but when he sits at a piano before an audience he blossoms with confidence in his music. Judy Garcia abandoned piano lessons at age 14 because of boys and other distractions more interesting than Miss Cook, her piano teacher, who "smelled of Vick's cough drops."

They paced back and forth, buttoned and unbuttoned their collars, chatted in tight voices. It was a tense time for these kids who had been swept up in the madness of gangs and drugs before they were old enough to get driving permits. Most of them had been convicted of murder.

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 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.

To earn his living, Rich Smith totes out a white upright piano in a '79 Chevy van that shakes and rattles at every bump. Arriving at his most frequent venue, Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, he pulls out two planks he stores on the floor and wheels his upright onto the street. Often he spends more time toting and tuning the piano than actually playing it. But when he plays, even in a noisy venue filled with competing performers, the effect is often electric.

Pianist Phyllis Chen worried when she asked Andre Watts, her mentor at Indiana University in Bloomington, if she could use toy pianos for one of her doctoral recitals. After all, without his permission, the department wouldn't even consider it. Watts, more used to the standard classical repertoire, found the request surprising. But he listened closely to her proposal.

At exactly noon on Thursday, 30 pianists sitting at 30 colorful pianos scattered at public spaces throughout Los Angeles County will simultaneously break into the first prelude of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier. " The so-called play-in will mark the Southern California debut of a globally oriented public art project called "Play Me, I'm Yours. " But the real fun won't begin until after the opening performances have finished. That's when the pianos - in locations that include L.A. Live and Monterey Park, USC and UCLA, as well as Santa Monica Pier and Old Pasadena - become available to the public, for anyone and everyone to play 24 hours a day for the next three weeks.

In a nondescript warehouse amid the alfalfa fields and vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley, Ken Caulkins and a half-dozen employees create an amazing array of automated musical instruments. A calliope for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August is under construction there today.