My manager Richard Guy rescued a 1910 (1911?) Hamburg Steinway Grand piano from a music school in Coventry that was closing. They were actually going to throw it out. It had been donated to the school years ago and never used. Rich found it on it's side, leaned up against a wall. The piano was a mess, bearly playable. But it was a Steinway and I had played some wonderful Steinways of the exact same vintage so I was hopeful.

I was not sure how to go about it. I have been a Steinway loyalist all my life but even good companies have their bad periods and I didn't want to pay an ungodly amount of money to have the piano restored by Steinway at a point when Steinway is making/selling/promo-finessing second-rate pianos and naming them after unfriendly cities.

So I asked the best piano player I knew in Holland, Reiner van Houdt, for a recommendation and he told me that he'd played on old Steinways that had been rebuilt by Jos and that they were terrific and that was good enough for me.

And Reinier was not wrong. I've played a lot of good pianos and my Hamburg Steinway sounds and feels every bit as great as those few early Twentieth Century Steinways that I feel in love with when I was 18.