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Over 10 months, it had been shaped, spray-painted, polished, worked on, tuned and worked on some more. In three minutes on its last day at the Steinway & Sons factory in Queens, grand piano No. K0862 got a new identity.
It became No. 565700 when a worker named Davendra Viran stenciled that number onto its cast-iron plate, a few inches above the keyboard, the 565,700th Steinway ever made.
A couple hours later, after bouncing over the Queensboro Bridge in a truck, it got another new identity.
Steinway had chosen No. 565700 to be one of the 300 or so grands in its concert fleet, a bank of pianos the company lends out for concerts, recitals, recording sessions and television programs. Steinway assigns those pianos yet another number, beginning with the letter C, for concert.
So No. 565700 became CD-60 - the D stands for the model - after it was dropped off at Steinway's store in Manhattan. Not in the first-floor showroom, with the wide window looking out on West 57th Street, but in the basement.
Among pianists, the Steinway basement is a storied destination, one that confers status. There, beneath fluorescent lights that hum and steam pipes that hiss, is what may be Steinway's most important asset, a roomful of long black pianos (except for the long white one that went to Billy Joel for a recording project some years ago). Their almost identical looks belie the basement's importance: every one of the pianos there is different. And everyone from Moriz Rosenthal -one of the last pupils of Liszt - to Glenn Gould to Mitsuko Uchida to Alfred Brendel has gone there to pick the perfect one to play.
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