How do you get two whales in a Mini? – Why, up the motorway of course! (To Wales, you see. Boom, tish! An old joke, sorry, but I couldn’t resist.) And how do you get 88 pianists at one piano? With ingenuity and a lot of long metal levers, is the answer. This particular world record was set in 2019 when a team of Cambridge University engineers under Professor Julian Allwood asked thousands of schoolchildren to invent ways to activate piano keys from a distance, so that 88 separate mechanisms could be ranged around the keyboard and employed during one piece. (Have a look at 88pianists.com to see some films made about the event if you’re curious.) But if you think that’s cheating – after all, when we say ‘players’, don’t we really mean ‘people who put their fingers directly on the keys?’ – then be assured that the same team created an opportunity earlier in the day for 30 (yes, thirty!) children to be physically present at one piano and play a piece together. So there were two world records in one day. Blimey.
The films made about these events are charming, inspirational, amusing, and – musically speaking – perfectly horrible. I’d rather go back and try to squeeze that pair of Moby Dicks into a Morris Minor than listen to the pieces again,
