Piano 60

Piano 60 was captured in Alverstone Village Hall, in the valley of the eastern Yar, on the Isle of Wight, a place which will be noticed properly in due course. I was allowed to photograph it after I had made it clear that I was not trying to snap any of the photographs in the exhibition which we had gone to see.

A Bentley piano, which I think is a first, having checked the relevant blogs with the search key 'bentley piano'. Lurking doubt, in that searching the archive turned up a dozen or so months with the same search key. The one that I could be bothered to check concerned the cars. 

Reference 3 suggests that Bentleys were mainly a manufacturer of cheap uprights, with the brand sold to China in 2007. Reference 4 is rather politer. But there is no trace of them at (very flashy) reference 5, although this very large piano manufacturer clearly does buy up European, particularly German, brand names, presumably for marketing purposes.  Perhaps their instruments are now well enough regarded in their own right that they don't need cod labels from England any more.

In any event, this piano does not look as if it had been bought since 2007, so probably a genuine English Bentley. That said, if I knew what I know now, I would have looked under the lid for Chinese flavoured markings.

PS: once again, Word had trouble closing a blog archive file, this one from 2018, although it did get there in the end. Maybe I ought to use the Word 'save to pdf' feature to convert all these Word files, possibly in some discontinued format, to pdf files? Not this afternoon though.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/piano-59.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/piano-1.html.

Reference 3: https://www.robertspianos.com/cdetails.php?ID=58&Make=Bentley-Pianos.

Reference 4: https://www.mozartproject.org/did-bentley-ever-make-a-piano/.

Reference 5: https://pearlriverpiano.group/.

Group search key: pianosk.