Death and the Piano

"The piano is a very finicky instrument to record, with an existential problem: attack followed by decay, every note a death. You want to capture the ping, the clarity of the beginning of each note, but you also want to get the ephemeral singing tone that remains. It's a complicated balance: the souls fo the piano and of the pianist hang on it." 

From Jeremy Denk's nice piece "Flight of the Concord" in this week's New Yorker