The Forte/Piano festival of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, Cornell University, was packed with concerts, lectures and masterclasses, hosting more than fifty performers, scholars and piano makers from around the world. One of the aims of the festival, held on 5–9 August 2015, was to renegotiate the borderland between the early piano (typically given the blanket name of ‘fortepiano’) and the modern piano. The concerts and lectures demonstrated that, regardless of historical period, an involvement with hammered keyboard instruments – whether on the part of musicians, audiences or builders – raises many universal concerns, and that many of the large-scale terminological distinctions we tend to make are secondary. During the course of the festival, the lovingly phrased distinction between ‘brown’ and ‘black’ pianos was the only thing that remained. What does matter, however, are the individual characteristics of individual instruments, and in order truly to ‘celebrate pianos in history’, sixteen copies or originals of grand pianos from the 1730s to 1960 were made available for the festival. Performers were able to pick those instruments that were – for reasons of chronology, sound or construction – best suited for their repertoire (the logistical task of moving the instruments and keeping everything in tune must have been enormous).

This highly stimulating event was largely due to the initiative of Malcolm and Elizabeth Bilson. The organizing committee included Cornell University organist and Westfield Center Executive Director Annette Richards, Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute/McGill University), Roger Moseley (Cornell University), Andrew Willis (University of North Carolina Greensboro), David Breitman (Oberlin College) and Penelope Crawford (University of Michigan). Practical matters were taken care of by the indefatigable programme coordinator Damien Mahiet and his team, who did a fabulous job of keeping things running smoothly.

The festival's strikingly high performance standard became clear to me during the first joint concert, when Olga Pashchenko launched into the tricky fugue of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Variations, Op. 35, and there was not a single performance that failed to demonstrate some point of special interest. During the same concert, Monica Jakuc Leverett played music by Maria Szymanowska, Marie Bigot and Frédéric Chopin. David Kim (Whitman College) concluded the concert with Schumann's Carnaval, in a version that emphasized the fantastic element of Schumann's music rather than the dance-like one. Wednesday's evening concert, featuring music by C. P. E. Bach and Mozart, was played by Kristian Bezuidenhout on a Viennese piano after Anton Walter by Paul McNulty. Bezuidenhout's playing is marked by strong musical convictions and attention to each challenge. No matter how virtuosic a passage, he has energy to shape the sound of individual notes; no matter the length of a sequence, he adds dynamic nuance without overstepping the bounds of the Viennese piano. There was not a wrong note to be heard, which, on a light and relatively shallow Viennese action, is a marvel in and of itself.

Thursday's lectures on the theme ‘Past and Present Meanings of Performance Practice’ began with Malcolm Bilson (Cornell University) outlining the field of ‘50 Years of Early Pianos’. He focused on the importance of various kinds of piano, and on how we can intelligently make use of musical information contained in historical recordings. Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University), with Yiheng Yang at the piano, demonstrated in her lecture about fortepiano/harpsichord duos that the arrangement of music in other scorings for two keyboards was a common eighteenth-century practice. Ryan MacEvoy McCullough (Cornell University) lectured on works for piano and electronics to introduce his and Andrew Zhou's joint performance in the lunchtime concert, which was followed by a virtuosic performance of a four-hand Moscheles piece by Tom Beghin and Andrew Willis.

In the afternoon's first ‘Builders & Performers’ session, Edward Swenson spoke about composers who preferred the fortepianos by Conrad Graf, with excellent performances by pianist Stefania Neonato (Musikhochschule Stuttgart). A masterclass with Kristian Bezuidenhout followed in which he discussed two topics that recurred throughout the festival: the question of how, and how much, to use the pedal on early pianos, and ways to rein in the tone and be ‘Zen’ about an instrument's sound, when the piano is itself ‘hard and grippy’.

The joint evening concert began with Jiayan Sun performing Beethoven bagatelles and the Sonata Op. 111 on a Viennese piano from 1835 by Joseph Simon with a pleasantly ‘wooden’ – but not dry – tone. His interpretation of Op. 111 was certainly the most convincing one I’ve ever heard in concert, in terms of both structure and sound concept. Hardy Rittner played three of Chopin's preludes and the four impromptus very brilliantly on an 1868 Érard that sounded more open yet fluffy in comparison with the Simon piano. He demonstrated some thought-provoking interpretations of these well-known pieces, especially his attractive rubato in the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude that led to a pronounced degree of controlled asynchronicity between the hands. Finally, Anthony Romaniuk presented a selection of music by Liszt's American pupils William Mason, Edward MacDowell and Alexander Siloti on Cornell's newly acquired 1876 Blüthner, whose very well-balanced sound was, of the three instruments heard in the concert, closest to the modern piano (though more intimate and round). He played with great flair and precision, and the Blüthner was a good match for the exuberant character of this repertoire.

Friday's lectures had the theme ‘Pianists and Their Pianos’. Erin Helyard (Australian National University) began with a fascinating overview of the history of modern research on pianoforte pedalling. Sandra Rosenblum, a scholar who has had an immense influence on the way we play early pianos today, explained how Chopin changed pedalling indications in his music depending on the country of publication. The implication was that these changes were due to his ‘response to different pianos’. Concluding the session, Maria Rose (RILM) spoke on Dussek and his Parisian contemporaries at the time of his return to Paris.

The lunchtime concert featured two of Mozart's sonatas for violin and piano performed by violinist Lucy Russell (Royal College of Music, London) and Sezi Seskir (Bucknell University) on a Viennese piano, as well as a selection of Schubert songs with soprano Martha Guth (Vancouver International Song Institute) and Penelope Crawford at an original Graf piano. The second ‘Builders & Performers’ session was devoted to early Florentine pianos, with lectures by harpsichord and piano maker David Sutherland and pianist Antonio Simón. The afternoon concert was shared between Kristina Kobb (Schubert) and Erin Helyard (Clementi), who brilliantly brought Cornell's 1827 Broadwood to life.

Alexei Lubimov played the Friday evening recital, with selections from Debussy's two books of preludes and L’isle joyeuse, Stravinsky's Piano Sonata (1924) and a number of pieces by Erik Satie. The texts from Satie's Sports et divertissements (1914) were recited with subtle humour by Gary Moulsdale (Cornell University). It is difficult to imagine a more convincing Debussy, or one more stylistically and technically solid. Lubimov's Satie was perfectly balanced between seriousness and tongue-in-cheek absurdity. By comparison, Stravinsky's Sonata was appropriately played in a more sober fashion. The Blüthner piano, while not perhaps the ultimate choice for this repertoire, was a fabulous match for Lubimov's fluent technique and full tone. This became especially clear in such sonorous cornerstones as Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie and Feux d’artifice. Lubimov played Chopin's Barcarolle, Op. 60, as an encore, with grand tone and gestures.

Saturday began with two lectures on ‘Eighteenth-Century Piano Culture’, one by me (Tilman Skowroneck, Gothenburg) about the ‘art world’ of the early nineteenth-century piano and repairs by amateur piano owners, and one by Carmel Raz (Columbia University) about the ‘harpsichord metaphor’ in works of philosophers who explored the human mind and body. These lectures were followed by a masterclass with Alexei Lubimov, a refreshingly nuts-and-bolts session about phrasing, accentuation, musical dialogue and the art of listening to oneself, especially when playing on an unfamiliar instrument. The ‘Builders & Performers’ session of the day featured Paul McNulty and Viviana Sofronitsky, who discussed and demonstrated various recent building projects of the McNulty workshop.

The lunch concert was another joint recital: Shin Hwang played a thoughtful and technically fluent rendition of Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana, Michael Pecak presented works by Maria Szymanowska, Karol Kurpińsky and Franciszek Lessel, and Petra Somlai concluded the concert with Schubert's three posthumous Klavierstücke d946, which she played with a magnificent sense of style, gesture and shadings, as well as with absolute abandon.

Saturday afternoon and evening were reserved for the eagerly awaited two-part reunion concert that featured the seven pianists who, in 1995, were the first to perform and record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas on period pianos: Malcolm Bilson and his former students Tom Beghin, David Breitman, Ursula Dütschler, Bart van Oort (The Hague Royal Conservatory), Zvi Meniker (Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien, Hannover) and Andrew Willis. A milestone at the time, the recordings have since inspired scores of keyboardists around the world to do serious work with early pianos. The project pushed Beethoven research in a new performance-practical direction, and it remains influential today both for pianists’ and scholars’ approaches to Beethoven, and as a contribution to the world of the fortepiano in general.

The concert drew an enthusiastic crowd of festival participants, fortepiano supporters and local concertgoers. Dütschler was first on stage, with the Sonata Op. 27 No. 1, ‘quasi una fantasia’ – a good choice, as the sonata's first part perfectly matched the general sense of expectancy in the audience. Dütschler handled this overlap between internal and external suspense admirably well. A challenge of a more athletic kind was Beethoven's Op. 106 (‘Hammerklavier’) in a contemporary arrangement by Carl Friedrich Ebers for four hands. Beghin and Willis joined forces behind the 1835 Simon piano for this piece. The performance was visually entertaining and musically compelling. Meniker began the second half with the Sonata Op. 31 No. 2 (‘Tempest’), played in a muscular but controlled fashion, with some very lovely dream-like pianissimo passages in the first movement. Breitman offered a few moving words in honour of Bilson and about the ‘Cornell Seven’, before launching into an exceptionally fine version of the late Sonata Op. 110. An exquisite detail was his subtle repetition on tied notes, according to Beethoven's changing fingerings. Van Oort also addressed the audience, suggesting that this festival represented ‘the greatest gathering of fortepianists in history’. He then played the Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 (‘Moonlight’), with a beautiful Adagio sostenuto played calmly but in true alla breve tempo, an Allegretto with a convincing, somewhat folksy trio section, and an impetuous Presto. Bilson concluded the concert with an astoundingly meditative reading of Op. 109. His performance of the last movement of this sonata, full of inspiration and wisdom, was one of the high points of the entire festival.

The Sunday morning lectures addressed nineteenth-century approaches to public improvisation. Gili Loftus (McGill University) spoke on Clara Schumann and her habit of improvising in concert, and Shaena Weitz (City University of New York Graduate Center) discussed the short-lived French music periodical Le pianiste and its criticism of a ‘monochromatic’ style of improvising. The festival's lectures were rounded off with a panel discussion on ‘Teaching Pianos in Universities and Conservatories’. An audience discussion concluded the session.

In the last afternoon concert, Frédéric Lacroix (University of Ottawa) brilliantly performed the variation cycle Hexameron, a joint composition by Liszt, Thalberg, Pixis, Herz, Czerny and Chopin. Liv Glaser (Norges musikhøgskole) set out to play various selections from Grieg's oeuvre on the Blüthner, which, however, developed a mechanical problem. While Glaser entertained the audience with charm, wit and esprit, pianos were swapped. She concluded her programme on the Érard to great applause. The final piece was Brahms's Horn Trio, Op. 40, played by Lucy Russell (violin), R. J. Kelley (natural horn) and Mike Lee (piano). The listeners experienced many subtle tone colours, especially in the beautifully played Adagio.

The final concert of the Festival, celebrating Alexander Scriabin and Jean Sibelius, was shared between Matthew Bengtson and Tuija Hakkila (Sibelius Academy). Bengtson played selections from Scriabin's preludes, poèmes, études and other small pieces as well as the Tenth Sonata, Op. 70. For me, Bengtson's meticulous yet rhythmically flexible playing and stunning virtuosity were the last impressions from the conference. Unfortunately, I had to miss Hakkila's part of the concert, which I afterwards heard was outstanding in every way.

This Festival will remain in the minds of the participants as an event of great importance; it was able to show how solid and engaging the art of playing early pianos has become in the past decades, how many diverse personalities the early piano and its music is able to attract, and how strong the sense of community is among the players. It also showed how performance, practical research and artistry can blend, given the proper platform, instead of each sitting in its own corner or standing in each other's way. One only can hope for a follow-up event in the near future.