Despite anxiety about potential “Y2K” disasters from software malfunction, Barbara flew to Europe on New Year’s day, 2000. This was the beginning of numerous tours with the Labèques in combination with Il Giardino Armonico or Musica Antiqua Kὃln, the two best period performance ensembles of the time. Rehearsals after their Silbermanns arrived in the fall of 1999 revealed that they didn’t have the technical/tuning assistance necessary to deal with these specialized instruments, so they brought Barbara to Europe half a dozen times in 2000 to cover their tours.
The Labèques’ critical deadline for two years was a concert with IGA in the Musikverein on Easter Monday. Everyone in Vienna goes to that concert, which is a major holiday. The hall is famous for its acoustics and as the site of events like the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s day concert. The schedule called for an Easter Sunday concert in Innsbruck (baskets of goodies appeared at rehearsal), after which the instruments were trucked across the Alps overnight to Vienna, arriving by early morning. In the rehearsal room, they were still in tune from Sunday’s concert! The concert was broadcast live on Austrian TV, and the sold-out house clapped rhythmically for encores.
Back in Washington, the Smithsonian mounted a major exhibition showcasing the history of the piano upon the tricentennial of its invention. The instrument museum in Rome agreed to lend its Cristofori piano for a year (government connections!). The exhibition began with the 1722 antique and ended with Liberace’s rhinestone-studded Steinway. We asked if it would be possible to examine and document in detail this example of the piano e forte inventor’s work. Rome granted permission, so we spent many “non-public” hours (very early and very late) measuring, photographing, drawing, and ultimately X-raying the original.
Planning to make a film about the exhibit, the Smithsonian sent a crew to the shop to document fortepiano work in progress. One of the exhibit’s curators commissioned a reproduction of the Cristofori, so the shop headed back to the beginning in the piano world. Full circle.
