The Piano Centre's Yamaha CFX review

Steinway have long held centre stage Worldwide as the Concert Grand Piano. Many other pianos have followed closely behind but rarely got under the spotlight. Sure, it is a matter of preference, but when a piano needs to compete with an orchestra and fill a concert hall with an array of tonal colour and expression – it needs to do so without sounding strained, strident or shrill, but be strong, full, rich, clear, clean and singing as though this is what the piano wants to be doing and it does it with ease.

Subtle nuances must be heard by all, with the warmth, clarity and depth the composer could only wish a piano can do with singing phrases and lyrical passages.

The feel is to be the extension of the pianist’s hands – natural, effortless and responsive, fast and even, with total precision.

The concert grand piano has multiple personalities – and it needs to be every mood and to be every mood perfectly: blue, aggressive, fierce, passionate, rushed, excited and joyful.

What we have experienced this year makes history. The long-awaited birth of the ultimate piano that is bigger, better, stronger, faster than any piano ever before – the Yamaha CFX Concert Grand.

This is a bespoke piano. For 12 years, Yamaha have developed various prototypes, bringing them to Concert Halls around the World consulting with International Concert Pianists, Hall Acousticians and Piano Technicians. Working closely to discover exactly what makes the dream concert grand piano: the keystroke, weight, repetition, control, responsiveness, speed, attack, tone, sustain, range, expressiveness, projection, clarity, depth, warmth, partial / fundamental balance and character. And what better way to develop the ultimate instrument than to do so on the concert platform with concert pianists and elite technicians? Well, you can’t beat that – but you can compliment it with science and precision engineering...

Taking their own CFIIS Concert Grand along with other leading concert grand pianos (guess which ones!) Yamaha stripped the pianos down, discovered each piano’s unique features and found what made them so. Yamaha placed special acoustic sensors on these pianos in their laboratory to see how the sound energy travelled within the piano, where it peaked, where it tailed off. Precision imagery was used to record hammers striking strings, how the kinetic energy was carried to the string, where it was lost and where more could be transferred into power and tone. The keyboard and action were subject to these tests also, to find and remove excess friction, lag and energy absorption. Using CAD technology, the prototypes were developed with 1/1000mm accuracy – leaving nothing to chance, minimising scope for variance.

A bespoke, hand-crafted concert grand piano that will prove to be the very best, and better still – consistently the best, the Yamaha CFX Concert Grand piano is the biggest note in piano making history since the Steinway model D.

For a more intimate environment, a 6’11” model is the perfect recital, recording and institution instrument – the CF6. For the home, if there is space both for piano and for its tone to breathe – the CF6 is the perfect instrument too.

The smaller, but still very competent and broad-ranged 6’3” model CF4 requires less space but is equally an experience to play that you’ll want ever hour of every day in your home, practise-room or studio.