In December, the pianist Orli Shaham was asked to help the Charlotte Symphony choose a new piano to be used in a new concert hall, the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, part of the Blumenthal Performing Art Center. Orli travelled to the Steinway & Sons factory showroom in Astoria, Queens where officials from the Charlotte Symphony and the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center were waiting to hear her test five Steinway "D" grand pianos and give her expert assessment.

Orli has chosen pianos for symphony orchestras in the past, but it's always been for a concert hall that she knew. The Knight Theater, though, is a brand-new hall, and in an interview with Gail Wein, Orli explains how that poses a special challenge.

Orli Shaham: Nobody knows for sure what the hall sounds like, nobody knows how a piano will react to that hall, and here I am picking it out hundreds of miles away, without even the opportunity to test the instrument in the hall.

We were at Steinway, at the Steinway Hall in Queens, New York, and playing their concert grands. All five pianos were spectacular pianos, there's no question. They all made me feel good to be a pianist.

But each one had a little thing that it did better than the others, and as we were picking, Nos. 2, 3 and 5 we eliminated over time because they either weren't quite powerful enough, or they didn't have quite the same evenness of tone that we were looking for, or the roundness yet. Now, chances are, that after six months of being played, they will all have all of those. But of course you're choosing a brand-new piano, which means you're going to have to guess how it's going to open up in a little bit of time, and how it might sound after it's been played for a while.

No. 4, from the beginning, wowed me. It's one of those things, that when I sat down at the piano, and I immediately turned to the folks who were there and I said, "this piano inspires me." And that doesn't happen all that often, where I feel my performance grows and changes because of the quality of the instrument.

So we took No. 4, which was the one that really inspired me, and No. 1, which we felt was really very even and quite powerful, and they were just both so lovely. I kept playing, going back and forth, and they were quite different. No. 4 was very intimate, with a gorgeous rounded tone, the elegance factor, went through the roof on that piano. But it was for a small intimate space. If I were making a recording, that would be the piano I would choose, because you could get the power out of the recording. You want the beauty out of the instrument.

But No. 1 was so even throughout, so easy to play, not just in terms of the physical touch of the piano, but also the control over it, and it had so much power that we stood there, listening to these two and saying, they're both fabulous, and it really just depends what you're using it for.

Again, we don't know what the hall is going to sound like, although we do know that it's a medium-sized hall, about 1200 seats. Nevertheless, this piano will be used with orchestra as well as in smaller groups, so it has to have power. And No. 4, much as I was inspired by it, lacked the power.

What sold me on piano No. 1, was listening to one of the ladies who works at Steinway play. She sat down and played a little bit of Chopin and I could hear that she sounded very good on both pianos, but I could hear that on piano No. 4, the one that had inspired me so much, on that one she was having to work to get the sound that she wanted. Now, there's probably a large handful of professional pianists out there who love precisely that kind of sound and that kind of work, but we need to try to satisfy everyone. We assume there are going to be, in the next four or five years, maybe 50 different pianists who will come and play this piano, so we decided to go with the one that seemed more universal, in its feeling, and in its expression.

Gail Wein: I have an important question. All of these pianos are all the same model, they're all a Steinway D, which is the 9-ft Steinway. How could they possibly be different? It's the same 88 keys, the same strings, the same hammers, the same hunk of wood; how could they possibly be different at all?

OS: The real question of why they're different begins with the hunk of wood. It's not the same hunk of wood, and anybody who's ever looked at violins and knows the difference between them knows that they don't sound the same. So already, the fact that it's just a different piece of wood and a different piece of metal, the sounding board, which is wood, makes a big difference on the sound of the piano.

And of course the hammers interacting with each other, the weight on the hammers, also has an effect. Steinway as a company tries to make them as consistent as possible, and they do a wonderful job. But it's part of the wonderful art of pianobuilding that they don't automatically sound the same. You know, there are so many parts in a concert piano, we're talking about thousands of parts. And they all make a difference in how it feels and how it sounds. There's no way you could duplicate one, even if you tried very very hard.

GW: Beyond the parts that are in a piano, it must also matter how those parts are tweaked. There are piano technicians who tune pianos and who do other things to pianos, so doesn't it matter how the piano is adjusted?

OS: It makes a huge difference how the piano is adjusted. And in fact when we were at Steinway Hall choosing these pianos, it turned out that No. 1, which is the one we eventually chose, had specifically been adjusted for a pianist who was coming into town. The technician thought he might pick this one for something specific. So it may be that because he had put that kind of effort into adjusting it for a particular concert pianist, that it already had some of the characteristics a performing concert pianist might want.

GW: How long did this process take you?

OS: Amazingly enough, choosing these pianos only took about 45 minutes. But, emotionally, it feels like a really involved thing. Because you really commit yourself to each of the instruments as you're picking them out. But the folks at Steinway are very good about giving you choices from which you're likely to find the right one. So it's not like you're picking from 100 different pianos and narrowing it down from there. They've already picked five for you that are very likely candidates for what you're looking for.

GW: We are talking about a big commitment, because that piano must cost something in the five figures.

OS: A Steinway concert grand, which is the model D, is almost nine feet long. It weighs 990 pounds, and it costs somewhere between five and six digits. But it is a major commitment, not only for the concert hall and for the symphony in terms of, well you schlep this thing all the way to Charlotte, what if it's the wrong one. But it's also a major financial commitment. So here I was being asked to make this choice in about an hour, of which piano is going to make everybody happy.

My hope is that when the Knight Theater opens up and they first put the piano out on that stage, everybody will say, "Hey! This was the right piano to pick for this hall."

We certainly had a great time picking it out.