''... He played for an hour or so on the great, long piano with its strong sound, already quite battered, which had been a present from the City of London.'' So runs an account, quoted in the booklet here, of a visit by Friedrich Wieck to Beethoven in the 1820s. The present was in fact from Thomas Broadwood himself, who had despatched the piano to Vienna at the end of 1817, having asked Kalkbrenner, Cramer and others to make a choice from among the best and most up-to-date instruments his firm could provide. Beethoven is said to have retained an affection for it even after receiving a later instrument from Conrad Graf, the leading Viennese maker. So this is the piano which may have resounded under Beethoven's fingers to some of the bagatelles and Kleinigkeiten Andras Schiff plays here. The pieces, roughly contemporary with it, suit it well.
At Beethoven's death the Broadwood was sold—by then ''there was no sound left in the treble and broken strings were mixed up like a thorn bush in a gale''—and in 1845 it was presented to Liszt, who left it in his will to the Hungarian National Museum. There, in Budapest, it can still be admired and I have several times longed to hop over the rope and give it a go. To judge from memory of other Broadwoods, it has been sensitively restored; there is impressive depth to the sonority, as well as variety of colour, and in Schiff's hands it is a splendid advertisement for ''the English piano sound'' near the peak of its early development. What awareness did Beethoven himself have of this? By the end of 1817 probably very little, and his well documented impatience with the imperfections of the pianos of his day should be remembered before we wax too lyrical over this resonant old Broadwood, filling the air with delicate vapours and little halos of sound which do not always disperse and decay before harmonies change. Yet Beethoven was still exploiting open-pedal effects producing a sort of undamped spillage—in the last piano music he wrote, at the end of the third of the Op. 126 Bagatelles: and how well Schiff and this instrument respond. More description and annotation is, I trust, not required. Here is one of the most interesting and successful early piano records I've heard, with first-class recording and presentation—in every way a notable production.'