An emergency piano airlift to Beirut

An emergency piano airlift to Beirut

News

norman lebrecht

February 09, 2022

The German maker Carl Bechstein has shipped six grand pianos and ten uprights to the National Conservatoire in Lebanon, enabling it to resume lessons.

The Conservatoire has been disrupted since the August 2020 explosion in Beirut port and subsequent electricity failures.

The instigator of the relief mission is the fine Lebanese pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha. The value of the shipment is 300,000 Euros.

Comments

  • Ferruccio says:

    Germany and Austria are two different countries, a little far away from England. Since it is based in Berlin, C.Bechstein it is a German piano company, not a Viennese one (that’s Vienna, Austria, and the piano company is Bösendorfer).

  • Ted says:

    The Chpoin set of El Bacha is absolutely fantastic.

  • Bonetti Micaela says:

    Bravo, musician El Bacha.
    Thank you, Carl Bechstein manufacturers.

  • fflambeau says:

    Wouldn’t it also be nice if Bechstein took responsibility for bankrolling Adolph? Not that they were alone but they gave lots of cash to the Nazis.

  • Liam Allan-Dalgleish says:

    It is apparently true that the later members of the Bechstein family piano business were Nazis. I don’t understand why a purely altruistic gesture like this one, which has nothing to do with the Nazis ( let it go) should have to encounter such a mean-spirited response. Enough with the straw-man being made of the Germans, who are a fine people with, right now, a much better racial environment than America or Israel. Disregard my previous statement.

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