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Date: 2/1/2021
SPRINGFIELD – Falcetti Music was started over 60 years ago by Sam Falcetti. Falcetti has since sold the company to his son, Tony, who now runs the business. About five years ago, John Slavic moved out from the West Coast to help Falcetti open and advance Falcetti Pianos, a division of Falcetti Music. The shop has locations in Springfield and Natick and houses a large showroom of Yamaha, Bösendorfer, Schimmel and Estonia pianos. Falcetti Pianos recently completed a large renovation to help them advance their business in piano maintenance.
According to Slavic, general manager of Falcetti Pianos, not offering maintenance can be the demise of many piano dealerships. Beside selling pianos, businesses like Falcetti Pianos have to make an investment to be able to fix, recycle and rebuild the pianos themselves.
“In the piano industry, it’s sort of paramount that pianos get conditioned and new pianos get prepared. I’ve been a concert-piano technician for 35 years,” he said.
The renovated space inside Falcetti Pianos allows for an area that is safe for employees to work on pianos. There is room for sanding, buffing, a new massive ventilation system, workbenches and lighting. According to Slavic, they had to build new walls and ceilings to create a separate space within the warehouse itself.
“It’s a pretty intense space. We bring the pianos in there and if we’re not reconditioning or restoring them, we are bringing them in there to prepare them and then they slide down over to voicing area and photo area where we can do recording,” said Slavic.
Even with the massive renovation, Falcetti Pianos still struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of 2020 the company had to close and lay everyone off. After about two months, Falcetti Pianos was then able to receive some PPP and reopen at a much smaller capacity.
“Slowly but surely we have done better. We’re not up to 100 percent of what we were before but we’re surviving,” said Slavic.
Before COVID-19, Falcetti Music would do about 400 lessons a week in their Springfield building. Falcetti Pianos would sell about 40 to 100 pianos a month and offer lessons in their 15 different teaching studios. Now, Falcetti Pianos has had to readjust their lessons. According to Slavic, they began by offering virtual lessons and now offer some in-person lessons as well.
“Some people would still really rather come in, so we offer that. We can’t do as much because we can’t use our normal teaching rooms which are really small, so we had to go use our bigger performance room and we can only have a couple teachers at a time,” he said.
Despite the struggle this small business faced throughout 2020, Slavic said he is excited about their recent renovation and for the future. Falcetti Pianos has recently secured contracts with universities in Boston, Connecticut and New Hampshire to service all of their pianos. They will bring in the pianos to be rebuilt and repaired in their new service room.
“That’s our new thing that we’re really excited about. We have our service department and our shop has been so revered because of the work that we’ve done that now universities are reaching out to us to do this kind of stuff,” said Slavic.
Those interested in learning more about Falcetti Pianos are encouraged to visit their website at https://www.falcettipianos.com/.