Modartt releases Walter pianoforte add-on for Pianoteq

Modartt has announced the release of a physically modelled virtual copy of a Walter pianoforte, Vienna, ca 1790, for its Pianoteq virtual instrument. It is available as a free download to all Pianoteq customers as an add-on instrument.

The Walter pianoforte is part of the KIViR project with the aim to create virtual copies of historical keyboard instruments. This historical instrument belongs to the famous pianist Paul Badura-Skoda.

Born in 1927, Paul Badura-Skoda is a pianist, music editor and pedagogue with an outstanding repertoire of more than 200 recordings, focusing mainly on the piano works by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. The legendary conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan discovered his talent in 1949 and brought him to fame. Thanks to his musical personality, Badura-Skoda is considered one of the world's most important pianists of our time. To the delight of many music lovers, he is still giving solo concerts to dazzled audiences worldwide.

"I was surprised hearing "my" Walter when playing on the digital keyboard! This skilful performance by Pianoteq is a marvel of intelligence and art; I admire the whole knowledge collected by my friends, musicians and engineers, and the relevance of their analysis: being able to reproduce, from samples, the whole sound scale of an instrument in all its palette of timbre requires a very precise analysis and a listening virtuosity that no computing system can invent. Congratulations for creating the tool that goes beyond our wildest hopes! I am eagerly waiting for what will come next."