As part of the 4th annual Stretto Piano Festival, HMDK Stuttgart will present Europe's first Steinway D with a Stretto keyboard (Sirius 6.0). The concert will feature 15 pianists, both students and teachers including Sonia Achkar, Julia Koch, Prof. Franziska Lee, Silvia Molan, Prof. Péter Nagy, Junna Narahashi, Lukas Saalfrank, Ai Sakae, Prof. Noam Sivan, Alexander Sonderegger, Yixin Song, Yu Tashiro, Sine Winther, Dani Zhogovska (HMDK Stuttgart) and Prof. Wolfgang Manz (HfM Nuremberg).

The program includes piano music in all its stylistic diversity (classical, improvisation, jazz). In between, these pianists will report on their experiences with the Stretto piano, specifically the SIRIUS 6.0 keyboard in the Steinway D.

Since 2020, HMDK’s Prof. Ulrike Wohlwender is spearheading the Sirius 6.0 initiative, which been dedicated to the distribution and further development of keyboards with a reduced scale. Sirius 6.0 is the first grand piano at a European music college with a 6.0 inch keyboard. It allows hands to “grow” by 12 mm per octave. Their prototype is a Yamaha baby grand piano with an optimized 6.0 keyboard from Laukhuff.