Stage personnel

At the beginning of the 1980s, I completed my piano building apprenticeship at Steinway & Sons Hamburg. After a further six years of training as a concert technician I worked in many countries all around the world. My responsibilities included elaborate repairs, concert service, working for recording sessions as well as for major international piano competitions.

In 1999, I moved to Vienna where I was the chief technician at “Steinway in Austria” until 2017. For a period of 12 years one of my many challenges included the “search for the perfect sound” in the Wiener Konzerthaus. This search led to some intense collaborations with some of the world’s best pianists.

Some of my work was documented in the feature film “Pianomania“, which was shown in cinemas worldwide and won numerous prestigious awards.

I have been self-employed since the beginning of 2018.

In addition to collaborating closely with many renowned pianists and working for major concert halls and festivals as well as exclusive private clients, I give seminars and lectures around the world. These often extend beyond the traditional confines of piano making. “After all, a piano is only human – what musicians can learn from their instruments” is the title of one of my lectures and describes the complex relation between the sound of a musical instrument and the psyche of its players.

In order to have more technically flawless instruments available to artists in the future, I have set myself the goal to further train and promote young, highly motivated and talented piano technicians.

Alongside this undertaking, it gives me great joy to realize my vision of the piano duo project with Annemarie Schindler, a great supporter of young pianists.

Photo: Stefan Oláh

It was about 1996 when Marc Lipken and Andreas Arens carried out their first grand piano transport.

A teammate in the canoe club had the plan to open a piano shop at the time and asked in the round of his sports comrades if someone wanted to take over the transport of the instruments for him. And since canoeists are known to be very strong people, three comrades-in-arms were promptly found who henceforth transported pianos to earn something in addition to their studies.

Marc Lipken has been the managing director of Up & Down Transporte GmbH, Wuppertal, since 2012. And despite many personnel changes, he still works with Andreas Arens today.

"The transport of concert grand pianos is a very demanding activity that requires far more steps and much higher precision than other transports", Marc Lipken describes the appeal of the profession, and Andreas Arens adds: "Being a transporter of concert grand pianos is an exciting job, because it is always new and always different and offers a lot of variety - and you get around a lot."

What might appear simple is in practice much more than just transporting a grand piano from A to B. Organization, logistics and finally a timely acclimatization of the instrument before the concert have a significant influence on the quality of the transport and thus also on the performance of the instrument during the concert or recording.

The art, therefore, is to transport a concert grand piano as quickly and precisely as possible, yet at the same time with utmost calm. For these reasons piano duo relies exclusively on the expertise of Up & Down for the transportation of the pianos.