David Winston (3)

David Winston (b. 1950?, Los Angeles) is a renowned British-American piano restorer, technician, and collector. Running his Period Piano Company since 1976 in Biddenden, Kent, Winston holds the Royal Warranty as "Restorer and Conservator of Pianos." He apprenticed in the United States, first as a luthier before training as a harpsichord-maker in Boston. In the early 1970s, David Winston relocated to England to work at Finchcocks Museum in Goudhurst, Kent. Soon after, he established a private workshop, the "Period Piano Company," working on the first restorations in his spare bedroom. In 1991, Winston restored one of the most iconic and well-known pianos in the world, built by British piano makers John Broadwood & Sons as a gift to Ludwig van Beethoven in 1817; the six-octave, two-pedal concert grand in the mahogany case was entirely triple-stringed, with CC-G# brass and A-c4 iron strings, to increase the loudness and vibrational response on which Beethoven heavily relied in later years, as his deafness progressed. The composer treasured this piano and wrote many notable works on it, such as Op. 106 Hammerklavier sonata. Beethoven endowed the piano to Franz Liszt, who donated it to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. David Winston devised a plan for unprecedented restoration with Eszter Fontana, the museum's curator of musical instruments, ensuring full documentation of the century-old instrument's current state, only using period-correct materials, and making all repairs fully reversible. In 1992, a renowned pianist Melvyn Tan took the instrument on "The Beethoven Broadwood Fortepiano Tour" organized by Thorn EMI across Austria, UK, and Hungary; the same year, EMI Classics released a critically acclaimed CD album. In September 2021, David Winston auctioned his personal collection of 23 antique pianos, featuring the 1925 Pleyel with "Auto Pleyela" mechanism in Chinoiserie Louis XV case, Pleyel's double piano, the 1937 Wurlitzer "1411 Butterfly," (the smallest 88-note grand piano ever made), and many other one-of-a-kind and rare instruments.