Three Steinway grand pianos are lined up on the stage at Bass Hall, gleaming in the bright lights from above. And before an almost empty hall, Stephen Beus is moving from one to another. He&rsquo;ll play for a few seconds, then hop up and jog to the next piano, slide onto the bench and play the same passage. Then, just as fast, he&rsquo;ll move back to the first one and try it again.</p><p>Beus, 27, is choosing which of the three instruments he wants to play in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. And his instincts seem to be failing him this time.</p><p>The Cliburn offers competitors three Steinway Model D grand pianos, two made in New York and one made in Hamburg, Germany. They&rsquo;re called 9-foot grand pianos, but if you want to be exceedingly picky, they&rsquo;re actually 8 feet, 11 3/4 inches long. And before the competition started, each Cliburn pianist had exactly 30 minutes to test them out and decide which one they liked best. </p><p>It&rsquo;s a Cliburn ritual: Before the first round begins, there are days of focused, sometimes tedious, piano selection. One by one, the young musicians arrive and steal over to the three pianos, playing short bursts of Bach and Schumann, Barber and Liszt at each one. With a digital timer ticking off the seconds, they puzzle over each instrument, deciding which has the fullest tone, the clearest chords, the most responsive keys. </p><p>There&rsquo;s no single favorite piano among competitors, says Louise Canafax, the backstage manager who&rsquo;s in charge of recording the pianists&rsquo; preferences. But there are some patterns. European pianists who are accustomed to playing German-made pianos, for instance, tend to gravitate toward the Hamburg. </p><p>Beus, an American competitor, is wavering on the shiny German-made grand. Along with his host family, Beus has arrived with two advisers: his wife, Alainna, who&rsquo;s a trained opera singer, and Di Wu, a fellow competitor whom Beus knows from the Juilliard School. They&rsquo;re in the audience as he plays, moving here and there among the empty seats, listening from different parts of the hall.</p><p>Beus slips off the bench of the Hamburg piano, steps to the edge of the stage and seeks out his wife in the nearly-empty hall. "What do you think, Alainna?" </p><p>He&rsquo;s leaning toward No. 2, the New York Steinway. But his advisers are telling him to consider No. 3. </p><p>To the untrained eye, the pianos are indistinguishable. And Canafax can&rsquo;t tell the pianists which piano is which: they&rsquo;re identified by number, No. 1 through 3. But for many of these young musicians, who have spent years playing top-quality instruments, it doesn&rsquo;t matter: They&rsquo;d know these pianos anywhere. There&rsquo;s a certain curve of the wood that makes a New York Steinway stand out. The wheels on German-made Steinways are smaller and gold. There&rsquo;s not a lot of mystery here, despite the Cliburn&rsquo;s secrecy. But ultimately, it doesn&rsquo;t matter where the piano comes from. They have to hear how each instrument &mdash; on this stage, in this room &mdash; sounds and feels when they play it.</p><p>Beus has used up almost all of his allotted 30 minutes. Backstage, there&rsquo;s a paper waiting for his choice and his signature: "This is to certify that Stephen Beus has chosen piano number ____ to be used in the preliminary round of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition." And the timer is ticking.</p><p>Beus plays a passage from a Barber sonata on the middle piano. He gets up and jogs over to No. 3, plays the same thing. </p><p>One seems too metallic, the other too muddy. </p><p>Alainna Beus chimes in on No. 2: "It&rsquo;s more mellow somehow, for me."</p><p>Wu: "It&rsquo;s more mellow. Exactly."</p><p>Both women are standing in the aisle now, edging closer to the stage. Beus goes back to No. 3 to try it again.</p><p>"Does that project?" he calls out from the stage.</p><p>"Yup."</p><p>"Does that sound muddy at all?"</p><p>"No."</p><p>Finally, when the timer starts beeping, Beus pats piano No. 3, the Hamburg Steinway. It&rsquo;s this one. But as he leaves the hall, he&rsquo;s still wondering. He went against his instinct here.</p><p>"I have a bias against the Hamburg Steinway," he says. He usually prefers the bold bass sound of the American-made Steinways. But on this morning in this particular hall, the Hamburg was his choice &mdash; and the choice of his advisers. If they say it sounded better in the hall, then that&rsquo;s the one he wants to play.</p><p>"What you hear on stage is often different from what you hear in the hall," he says. "You have to combine your own experience on stage with what they&rsquo;re telling you."</p><p>He thinks for a minute.</p><p>"Maybe I made the wrong choice. You never know."