ROBERTA FLACK: STYLE,

ART & MUSIC

Featuring Flack’s

Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano

Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 10:00 AM PT

Julien’s Auctions

in Los Angeles, California 

All Proceeds Benefit

The Roberta Flack Foundation

Celebrating the Artistry and Philanthropy

of Multi-Grammy Award Winner Roberta Flack

Download Hi-Res Photos of Highlights — HERE

Among the hundreds of items presented at Julien’s Auctions’ ROBERTA FLACK: Style, Art & Music, certainly Flack’s Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano will be a highlight of the Marquee items. It is currently estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.

In advance of the May 14 auction event, here is the story of the historic journey of the piano.

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Read online at Julien’s Auction, HERE

Suspended Grace: Roberta Flack Knew What She Wanted & Atlantic Records Delivered

WHEN ATLANTIC RECORDS OFFERED ROBERTA FLACK

A SIGNING BONUS IN 1968, SHE DECLINED IT — AND ASKED

FOR A BÖSENDORFER IMPERIAL CONCERT GRAND PIANO INSTEAD.

WHAT FOLLOWED WAS 42 YEARS AT THE DAKOTA

WITH THE PIANO AT THE CENTER OF IT ALL.

Lot #5. Roberta Flack
Atlantic Records Gifted Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano
(with Magazine)

There are photographs of a Bösendorfer Model 290 Imperial Concert Grand Piano suspended mid-air outside the façade of The Dakota on Central Park West. A crane is holding over 1,200 pounds of Austrian spruce and hand-wound string over one of the most storied addresses in New York City. The window of Roberta Flack’s apartment is removed from its frame to make way. It is the kind of image that needs no caption. But the story behind it — the real one — is even better than the image.

According to James Whitmore, a close friend, associate, and former personal assistant to Flack, the piano did not arrive as a spontaneous act of record label generosity. When Atlantic Records offered Roberta a signing bonus upon her joining the label in 1968, she looked at what they were offering and made a different request entirely. She declined the money. She asked for the piano instead.

That is the kind of decision that tells you everything about who Roberta Flack was — not just as an artist, but as a woman who had understood her own priorities since childhood. She had grown up seated beside her mother on the bench of the church organ in North Carolina, begun classical training young, enrolled at Howard University on a full music scholarship at fifteen — the youngest student ever admitted to the music program — and spent years teaching music in Washington D.C. public schools while performing at night in the Capitol Hill jazz clubs that eventually led to her Atlantic audition. She did not need a bonus. She needed the instrument that was equal to everything she already knew how to do.

She knew exactly which instrument that was.

Atlantic Records Gifted Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano
(with Magazine)

The Bösendorfer Model 290 Imperial is the largest, most sonically commanding production piano on earth. It was born in 1900 from a problem that no existing instrument could solve: the Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni, transcribing Bach’s famous organ works, found that no piano could reproduce the immersive depth of sixteen-to-thirty-two-foot bass pipes. He brought the problem to Ludwig Bösendorfer. Bösendorfer built a solution — a nine-and-a-half-foot concert grand with 97 keys and a full eight octaves, nine additional bass notes colored black to distinguish them from the standard register. Bartók, Debussy, and Ravel heard what it could do and began composing works specifically for it. Certain of those compositions can only be performed accurately on a Bösendorfer Imperial; no other piano reaches the frequencies they require.

The instrument’s construction is as unusual as its range. Eighty-five percent of the piano is built from high-altitude Austrian spruce — naturally dried for five years before use — including the rim and frame, which in most pianos serve only structural purposes. In the Bösendorfer, the entire body participates in sound production, functioning more like a violin than a conventional piano. When a note is played, the whole instrument resonates. The sound has been described, consistently and across generations, as almost orchestral. Fewer than 300 are made per year, by hand, in Vienna.

As new, one retails between $256,000 and $560,000. Roberta Flack, who had grown up renting piano time by the hour as a child in Washington D.C., understood exactly what she was asking for. Atlantic Records said yes.

Getting the piano in and out of apartment 78 at The Dakota required a crane and the temporary removal of her window from its frame. Once inside, the piano became the center of a creative life that would unfold over more than four decades. The photographs of the extraction operation — the Imperial suspended against the building’s Germanic stonework, over Central Park West — are among the more remarkable documents in this collection.  

Photo below – photographer credit’ James Whitmore

 

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According to Whitmore, the Bösendorfer was not a showpiece. It was a working instrument, and it worked constantly. Flack used it to collaborate with Maya Angelou on “And So It Goes,” the song they created together for her 1988 album Oasis — a collaboration between two of American culture’s most towering figures that the piano quietly facilitated. She used it working alongside songwriter and arranger Gwen Guthrie, composer and lyricist Morgan Ames, and Quincy Jones among many others. The instrument that Bartók and Debussy had composed for was now in a seventh-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, being played by one of the most gifted musicians of her generation in the service of some of the most important collaborative work of her career.

But the Bösendorfer was not only present for the work. Roberta Flack lived at The Dakota for 42 years — and according to Whitmore, she was a consummate hostess throughout, regularly throwing dinner parties for friends, family, and politicians. The piano was in the room for all of it: the music, the meals, the company she kept, the conversations that happened in a space defined as much by her presence as by its architecture. She was, as Whitmore makes clear, someone who understood how to hold a room — and the Bösendorfer was always part of the room she was holding.

The Dakota, for its part, is a building that accumulates history the way few addresses can. Completed in 1884 on the Upper West Side — so far north and west of Manhattan’s center at the time that it was jokingly named for the Dakota Territory — it became the defining address for New York’s artistic class across more than a century. Judy Garland lived there. Lauren Bacall. Leonard Bernstein. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who owned multiple apartments in the building, until the night of December 8, 1980, when Lennon was shot and killed at the building’s 72nd Street entrance as he returned home. Their son Sean Ono Lennon grew up in the building. He reportedly called Roberta Flack “Aunt Roberta.”

What this collection brings into the record — is that Roberta Flack was the first Black woman ever to own an apartment at The Dakota. In a building that has turned away Billy Joel, Madonna, Cher, and Antonio Banderas, and whose co-op board has been described as having “high standards and aversion to notoriety,” Flack moved in, stayed for 42 years, threw dinner parties, and played a Bösendorfer Imperial at the center of it all. That is not a footnote. That is a chapter.

Her apartment — on the southwest corner of the seventh floor, with Juliet balconies, 68 feet of southern exposure overlooking 72nd Street, 12-foot ceilings, four wood-burning fireplaces, and oblique views of Central Park — sold in 2018 for $5.8 million. The Bösendorfer, which could not leave the way most furniture leaves, came out the same way it went in: through the window, by crane. It has been part of her estate ever since.

Roberta Flack passed away on February 24, 2025, at the age of 88. The Bösendorfer Imperial Model 290 — the instrument she chose over money at the start of a career that would make the money irrelevant anyway — is now being offered as part of a collection of more than 500 artifacts drawn directly from her personal estate. It is offered together with a copy of the 2003 In Touch magazine that documented her life at The Dakota, and includes its original built-in humidifier system. All proceeds from the auction benefit the Roberta Flack Foundation.

In 1968, a twenty-something musician from Washington D.C. sat across from a record label and turned down the cash. She knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t a bonus. It was the greatest piano ever built. She played it for the rest of her life.