Jim Edwards said:

>Some little birdie told me to get up early this Sunday morning
>and check out what the A & E cable company was featuring on their
>8:00 am Breakfast With The Arts show.  Low and behold there was a
>new to the U. S. program made by the BBC of THE SECRET ISLAND: 7
>VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF SERGEI RACHMANINOV.  It was even better
>than the previous show done several years ago by the BBC which ran
>on the Bravo cable network.  This special featured Rachmaninov
>haunting music mixed with new motion picture footage shot by
>Rachmaninov's family and player piano rolls!
>Three of four rolls were used one of which was 60891H Etude
>Tableau, Op.39, No. 6 from the collection of recordings done by
>Rachmaninov for the AMPICO.  Strange part was that they were
>played on a Bosendorfer piano with what appears to be an AMPICO
>drawer installation.The quality of the sound of this instrument
>was not impressive but at least the producer of the show realized
>that Rachmaninov's piano rolls deserved a place in the  program.

>My question to all our learned MMD members from England is where
>they got the piano and is it a AMPICO Bosendorfer or did Rachmaninov
>record piano rolls for other reproducing system prior to his
>contract as an exclusive AMPICO artist.  Who else besides Dan knows
>the answer?

The answer is: Denis Hall, because I've just asked him. The Boesen-
dorfer belongs to John Farmer and is indeed an Ampico.  Ampico drawer
actions were installed in the pianos at the Vienna works and it was
common for reproducing Boesendorfers to spend some time being
demonstrated in the works and city showrooms before being released
to customers, to make certain they were well bedded in before final
adjustment.

Dan Wilson, London

 ( Robbie: does 'B"sendorfer' work at your end ? )

 [ The umlaut-o displays correctly on MS-DOS, Dan, but not on the Mac.
 [ We still have subscribers with antiquated ISP's, which complain if
 [ high-order (8-bit) ASCII is included in e-mail, so I must sigh and
 [ replace the special foreign characters with substitutions (as above,
 [ where I used the quotation symbol).  German text with two-letter
 [ equivalents is commonplace now, but I sure regret that we can't even
 [ spell Philippe Rouille's name properly!  -- Robbie