Yury's Piano

Yury Livshetzs piano shop is like something from the Old World. Here is a craftsman who can make pianos from scratch. This store is not a showroom for stuff that just arrived from a factory. Neither is it the showroom of a dealer in used pianos. Every piano in his showroom is the work of his own hands. He finds very high quality old pianos whose guts have been abused and he repairs or even REBUILDS them. The work can be quite extensive. The rear of the showroom is a workshop, and theres a piano-sized trapdoor in the floor through which he hoists the pianos up and down into his larger workshop below ground. In the Soviet Union he was also a concert pianist. So in addition to always having about ten diverse, unique pianos on hand to try out, his shop is frequently a venue for free classical concerts by world-class musicians, including violin-piano duets, clarinet-piano duets, etc. He tunes our piano in our home, and the result is great. Sounds much better than when I hired younger folks with fancy modern meters. Also, he helped us acquire and repair our venerable 1939 Haddorf Vertichord. We never touched the case, which still looks like a badly abused hunk of junk; but the sound and the action are absolutely wonderful! Furthermore, he doesnt waste our money. The very highest note on our piano is broken. When he came to fix a few other things, I thought hed take care of that too as a matter of course. But as a concert pianist he knows that there are no more than a handful of pieces that employ that note, and they are all virtuoso works for professional performers. He told us hed come back to fix it as soon as we told him we were practicing one of those pieces, and in the meantime to save our money.

He is a gem and his shop is gem.