one little visit.

"About a year," the guy said when I asked how long this shop had been in Portland.

I didn't catch his name. Corner of 11th and Alder St. downtown for now, but they were moving. I was a little worried cos there were 'store closing' signs posted everywhere with offers of sixty-percent discounts, but it turns out that was just because of the relocation they were planning in a month or so. I moved quick past the Estonias and Schimmels and others up front towards the back of the store with the brick wall. There was an L167 with the high-polish Madrona finish. Not a favourite, but a similar piano that I sat down to twelve years ago or so in a small store in Tacoma was what led to this absolute fascination I have with the Bechstein piano. And here, finally, was a Bechstein dealer within a couple thousand miles.

I played a few notes, then moved on. And there one was ... a D280. The nine-foot concert grand. I had never seen one in person. Too bad I am still far too self-conscious with some suited salesman nice as he was sitting at his desk or mumbling a conversation into his phone to really play. To try to break a string or two (Liszt broke plenty of strings!). So I tinkered some on it is all. No true banging out the cadenza to Ferocity And Fragility or any of the other crazy things I have stored in my head. I moved over to the more reasonable 7-foot-seven-inch C234 (only $163,000 versus the $212,600 price tag on the D280) and played a few phrases from the song I am working on at the moment. Took some photos with my iPhone. Grabbed all the sales brochures they had just for fun. Then wandered back to the salesman.

"Find one you like?" he mused with a slight grin, most likely just generally amused at the fact someone is toying on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument wearing canvas Toms shoes and a beatup Mountain Hardwear fleece hair all unkempt from a Smartwool headband meant to ward off the bite of a proper frigid northwest winter afternoon while outside the light faded from light blue to pink.

"Well, no ... but I have an antique Bechstein and was interested in your experience with rebuilding, particularly with Bechstein pianos since you're the only dealer on the West Coast."

I don't know if this took him aback or if he took me any more seriously, but we talked back and forth for a bit while he showed me a late nineteenth-century Chickering or some other American make of a piano (if a piano is not German I am really not interested) they had rebuilt and shimmed the soundboard since I had mentioned mine would need to be shimmed and perhaps recrowned. But he said they had rebuilt a Bösendörfer and had a direct line of communication back to the Bechstein factory in Berlin which did interest me.

So he passed me the card of some guy named Lotof who turned out to be the shop's owner to whom I will shoot off an email with some photos of my 1875 Bechstein attached to get the conversation started. I told him I was undecided about refinishing (I actually quite like the one-hundred thirty-five year-old worn patina scratches and all) but that I know it needs all new hammers installed and voiced and the action subsequently reworked, with perhaps new strings and soundboard work but that I wanted to maintain as much of the original parts (and thus soul of the piano) as possible.

And it struck me while there how I was reminded playing the new Bechsteins (even the C. Bechsteins which differ from the Bechsteins lacking the 'C.' designation on the fallboard in that all materials for the C. line are handpicked from German forests and metals for the strings and such are from cities like Röslau, whereas the 'Bechstein Academy' line lacking the 'C.' use materials found elsewhere but are still hand-assembled in the Berlin factory) of the utter uniqueness of an instrument nearly a century-and-a-half old. Made from trees felled before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Utterly handbuilt and delivered on horse-drawn carriage weaving through cobblestone streets of some late-ninetheenth century European city. The engravings on the soundboard much more illustrious than the new pianos with inscriptions of how they were built for the majesty of emporers and kings ('majestät des kaisers und königs') and inscribed with the address of the original factory on Johannis Strausse.

And the timbre. The sound. How Bechstein's scale design back then just shortly after the overstrung design became the norm had the tenor strings pass through the bass bridge giving that most important section of the piano one of the most sumptuous, near-liquid but still all-too-powerful tenor voices imaginable. There is nothing like it. This piano here in the corner of my living room one day will be given new life and it will sound absolutely one-of-a-kind.

But in the meantime for fifteen minutes or so I was able to walk amongst a gathering of them immersed in a quality like no other. Though per my norm of how I probably did not show it, I was excited out of my mind. New or old, I am still convinced the Bechstein pianos represent the finest pianos in the world. Someday I will find a concert grand in which to play, where I will pound out themes stored up for years and years only fit to be played - as DeBussy put it so well all those years ago - only on a Bechstein.