Piano concerto recordings better than live performances ?

[Laniciffo]

Hi All,

A few weeks ago I attended a classical concert performed by a good orchestra (hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt) and a talented young pianist, Jan Lisiecki. He played with ardour a full-size Steinway piano with its cover appropriately opened.
I was at the eighth row from the scene, a bit on the left side in a 1000-seat modern concert hall that was totally full.

While the rendering of the Grieg concerto was faultless and full of energy, I felt a bit disappointed : from my seat the piano was dearly lacking bass compared to any cd I play at home or what my wife plays on a much smaller Pleyel piano.

It would probably have been better if I had sat closer to the piano, but then I would have heard the violins and cellos far too loud compared to the rest of the orchestra.

Then I wondered : do I really strive for fidelity and want the same sound in my living room as at the concert ?

Altbough the emotions I got from that live performance were thrilling and invaluable, I actually prefer the more 'full' sound of the recording with a microphone close to the piano and the artificial piano/orchestra balance rendered by the mixing engineer.

Am I the only one ?

For the purely symphonic end of that same concert, my seat was almost optimal and I think good records played on a decent sound system are quite consistent with the concert experience.

What *sound* do you prefer : recorded, processed and precisely balanced music or the pure live exerience and its inherently imperfect balance of the various parts of the orchestra ?

What's your preferred seat for attending a piano concerto ?

The next question might be shocking for some : did you ever attend a live piano concerto that actually sounded as good as a good record ?

I suspect the live results could be better with a deeper scene, the piano closest to the public, the orchestra as far back as possible and a seat in the first rows.
Did you ever experience that ?

 

[rationaltime]

This is an interesting observation.

The question seems to be about the difference between live music and
recorded music. I would make the distinction that it might be more
about the difference between live performance and sound reinforcement.

In the orchestra sound reinforcement comes from having the same notes
come from multiple copies of similar instruments. The piano has a
disadvantage because it is solo. That venue is likely too large for it to
be playing bare.

While the rendering of the Grieg concerto was faultless and full of energy

I do not attend classical music concerts, but I have noticed something
in the performance plucked instruments such as guitar and mandolin.
When the musician increases the tempo to a fast pace there is a tendency
for the volume to decrease. That is, it appears the force used to pick
the notes decreases when the tempo becomes too fast. I wonder if the
same effect happens for playing the piano.

Though I have not attended a piano concerto, I prefer live music.
I think most shows are enhanced by good sound reinforcement. Various
instruments and musicians do not project equally. It is the job of
"the mixing engineer" to adjust that. It also makes the seating location
not so important.

I think a good seating location in a live performance of acoustic (no drums,
no amps on stage) music is about 3-5 meters in front of your favorite
instrument or performer. I am partial to violins. I have decided the viola
is my favorite.

In my opinion the dream of having a recording be the same as live
performance is kind of a myth. Your story illustrates that. A better goal
is to make a recording that provides a clean, enjoyable listening experience.

 

[MattHooper]

I grew up with 4 pianos in our home (large family, everyone played) and have attended plenty of live music and classical concerts with piano. I’ve never heard a live piano sound worse than a piano reproduced through sound system. I’ll take live piano any day.

 

[Keith_W]

A reminder that bass from the piano in a concert hall behaves the same as bass anywhere. You could be sitting in a null.

And @MattHooper if you have a piano in the listening room and listen to it side by side with the speaker, it is clear that it does not compare. I have never heard a speaker do that convincingly, although strangely enough digital pianos seem to do a better job!! I wonder what causes that. Maybe it's the mono source? Some kind of artefact from the recording?

 

[anmpr1]

I've never heard a piano recording (or any instrument I can think of right now) played through a hi-fi that made me think there was a piano in the room. Actually, for realism, I prefer the sound of a piano using just one loudspeaker. To me that sounds more 'real' than stereo recordings played through two loudspeakers.

Richard Heyser's 1986 Klipschorn review featured an interesting take:

...I could not not get an accurate sonic illusion of a piano, which always seemed larger than life, even at lower SPL. However we have all had the experience of hearing a live musical instrument being played in an adjacent room; it still sounds natural and we can readily tell that it is not artificially reproduced. The piano recordings with which I had had trouble while in the listening room actually sounded 'live in the next room' when I was in a room adjacent to the listening area.

Of course preference is not necessarily tied to any 'sonic reality'. Somewhere on ASR there is a thread in which a poster linked to a comparison between a 'live' acoustic guitar and its recording, played through loudspeakers. Many on the listening panel preferred the sound of the hi-fi over that of the real acoustic guitar.

 

[Cbdb2]

I grew up with 4 pianos in our home (large family, everyone played) and have attended plenty of live music and classical concerts with piano. I’ve never heard a live piano sound worse than a piano reproduced through sound system. I’ll take live piano any day.

If your past critical distance (which isnt far) your hearing more room than piano and if the room sucks so does the piano. So yea often a recording is better.

 

[MattHooper]

If your past critical distance (which isnt far) your hearing more room than piano and if the room sucks so does the piano. So yea often a recording is better.

Apparently I've never reached the critical distance then

I have a different view than some others on this. Some people say they find "good" recordings of instruments better than the real thing. As least with acoustic instruments (and frankly usually electronic instruments too - I played those as well), I don't find this to be the case. I pay a lot of attention to the differences between real and reproduced sound. It's not only somewhat part of my job as a sound editor, it's a life long habit of comparing real to reproduced. What I find is that, for me, I would take listening to someone playing a "cheap" acoustic guitar in front of me over "the best recording" of a "great acoustic guitar" on a sound system. That's because I hear a combination of subtlety, warmth, acoustic presence and timbral complexity that tends to go missing once an instrument is recorded and spit out in a hi fi system. A cheap real guitar sounds sonically richer to me than an expensive guitar reproduced through audio systems.

Same with pianos. I can hear them from close or far away and when I close my eyes it's always "Damn, no reproduction I've heard captures THAT."

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

Hi All,

A few weeks ago I attended a classical concert performed by a good orchestra (hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt) and a talented young pianist, Jan Lisiecki. He played with ardour a full-size Steinway piano with its cover appropriately opened.
I was at the eighth row from the scene, a bit on the left side in a 1000-seat modern concert hall that was totally full.

While the rendering of the Grieg concerto was faultless and full of energy, I felt a bit disappointed : from my seat the piano was dearly lacking bass compared to any cd I play at home or what my wife plays on a much smaller Pleyel piano.

It would probably have been better if I had sat closer to the piano, but then I would have heard the violins and cellos far too loud compared to the rest of the orchestra.

Then I wondered : do I really strive for fidelity and want the same sound in my living room as at the concert ?

Altbough the emotions I got from that live performance were thrilling and invaluable, I actually prefer the more 'full' sound of the recording with a microphone close to the piano and the artificial piano/orchestra balance rendered by the mixing engineer.

Am I the only one ?

For the purely symphonic end of that same concert, my seat was almost optimal and I think good records played on a decent sound system are quite consistent with the concert experience.

What *sound* do you prefer : recorded, processed and precisely balanced music or the pure live exerience and its inherently imperfect balance of the various parts of the orchestra ?

What's your preferred seat for attending a piano concerto ?

The next question might be shocking for some : did you ever attend a live piano concerto that actually sounded as good as a good record ?

I suspect the live results could be better with a deeper scene, the piano closest to the public, the orchestra as far back as possible and a seat in the first rows.
Did you ever experience that ?

Live music compared to playback is apples to oranges. Live music is a singular non repeatable phenomenon with visual stimuli and the gravitas of an event. Also what is often overlooked or not even understood is that live music varies widely in sound quality.

As for playback there seems to be some ideas I take issue with. I don’t want the sound of a live piano in my listening room. I want to be audibly transported to the concert hall and have the illusion of hearing the piano there. Those are very different goals.

Concertos in particular are challenging live experiences. I find the ideal seat for best sound balance between the soloist and the orchestra is not the ideal seat for experiencing the performance of the soloist specifically. Not just for the sound but also for the view.

And the view IS important! You are there in the flesh experiencing music being made in the moment by brilliant artists. That is a huge part of the wonder of live classical music. IMO it’s a wasted opportunity every time some audiophile goes to a classical concert fixated on the sound and the mental gymnastics of trying to compare it in their heads to their home audio. They could have just had an amazing experience and enjoyed it for what it was.

 

[Roland68]

Hi All,

A few weeks ago I attended a classical concert performed by a good orchestra (hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt) and a talented young pianist, Jan Lisiecki. He played with ardour a full-size Steinway piano with its cover appropriately opened.
I was at the eighth row from the scene, a bit on the left side in a 1000-seat modern concert hall that was totally full.

While the rendering of the Grieg concerto was faultless and full of energy, I felt a bit disappointed : from my seat the piano was dearly lacking bass compared to any cd I play at home or what my wife plays on a much smaller Pleyel piano.

It would probably have been better if I had sat closer to the piano, but then I would have heard the violins and cellos far too loud compared to the rest of the orchestra.

Then I wondered : do I really strive for fidelity and want the same sound in my living room as at the concert ?

Altbough the emotions I got from that live performance were thrilling and invaluable, I actually prefer the more 'full' sound of the recording with a microphone close to the piano and the artificial piano/orchestra balance rendered by the mixing engineer.

Am I the only one ?

For the purely symphonic end of that same concert, my seat was almost optimal and I think good records played on a decent sound system are quite consistent with the concert experience.

What *sound* do you prefer : recorded, processed and precisely balanced music or the pure live exerience and its inherently imperfect balance of the various parts of the orchestra ?

What's your preferred seat for attending a piano concerto ?

The next question might be shocking for some : did you ever attend a live piano concerto that actually sounded as good as a good record ?

I suspect the live results could be better with a deeper scene, the piano closest to the public, the orchestra as far back as possible and a seat in the first rows.
Did you ever experience that ?

What you describe is typical of a poor combination of room acoustics and placement of musicians/instruments.
I've been to a lot of concerts of different styles of music in my life, and with the good ones it's very difficult to reproduce them with the liveliness I experienced. But there were also some that had really bad acoustics. Sometimes for the reasons mentioned above, but also because, for example, a good recording had to be recorded and the entire setup and positioning was geared towards this. This can definitely be to the detriment of visitors.

Simply search for reviews in the relevant specialist forums or local fan or interest communities. Some concert halls are just not that great and some are actually really bad.
I've heard some concerts in old churches (classical, pop and chansons) that were simply incredible.

 

[DMill]

I appreciate artists that can almost perfectly replicate a recording. I tend to remember the concerts they didn’t though.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I've had something like that experience in spaces about the size you describe when a full orchestra is playing along. With smaller groups and a piano or especially piano solo in smaller spaces no.

 

[Chrispy]

Not a fan of piano concertos particularly, and the last time I bought tickets for a live classical performance was probably over 25 years ago. Seems to me Davies Hall had some general acoustic issues early on, too (I lived in San Francisco then). Some venues are better than others and having a poor seat can affect the experience.

That said, always preferred a live performance whether classical or any other genre. Smaller venues tend to be better than the larger ones IME too.

ps One thing I do like about home playback is adjustment of volume, I don't go for the higher volume stuff these days with my old ears and all....

 

[GXAlan]

I have usually found that musical recordings that have a Stradivarius violin have a bit of bite to them that I do enjoy. But when I have been at the symphony, this bite isn’t actually there.

This was confirmed when I was super lucky to hear John Williams/Anne Sophie Mutter and unintentionally but fortuitously end up in a seat that gave me THX equivalent theater viewing distances from the stage and end up at ear height to John Williams and just left of center (from audience) so that Anne Sophie Mutter was dead center to me. (all pure luck, those were the only two seats left when I bought the tickets).

So now I had “perfect seat in the house” and an opportunity to compare against the a modern recording of the same composer and violinist *and* Stradivarius.

The two things that struck me?
1) Less bite to the Stradivarius than recordings, but a different vertical phantom image than the other violinists.
2) The bass. How much I felt it in the chest compared to expectations or home environment.

There’s no question in my mind that the sound presentation of the Bose 901 more closely matches the perspective of being there at the symphony hall. There is clear stereo separation but not quite as three dimensional as a hifi setup.

 

[Justdafactsmaam]

Not a fan of piano concertos particularly, and the last time I bought tickets for a live classical performance was probably over 25 years ago. Seems to me Davies Hall had some general acoustic issues early on, too (I lived in San Francisco then). Some venues are better than others and having a poor seat can affect the experience.

That said, always preferred a live performance whether classical or any other genre. Smaller venues tend to be better than the larger ones IME too.

ps One thing I do like about home playback is adjustment of volume, I don't go for the higher volume stuff these days with my old ears and all....

IMO Davies Hall is tolerable if you sit in the first 10 rows and pretty bad from their back. The premium (most expensive) first balcony seats that they promote as the best are simply awful. Pianos sound like toy pianos from up there.

 

[MattHooper]

The two things that struck me?
1) Less bite to the Stradivarius than recordings, but a different vertical phantom image than the other violinists.

That's one of the things I notice with live unamplified instruments. Even bright instruments sound less obviosly "bright" in the sense of being piercing. This is I think due to the way recording and reproduction tends to leave some of the body and harmonic complexity behind, and generally sounds thinner. So the highest notes no a violin in real life will sound thicker and richer than the more wiry version that shows up through most recordings/playback.

2) The bass. How much I felt it in the chest compared to expectations or home environment.

Yeah, that's another one. The sense of presence and acoustic power of real instruments. Most drum sets in real life make audiophile systems sound like a joke.

Another reason I said I find real pianos more compelling than any recording is tied to this aspect. So a distant piano recording, once it gets to me through stereo speakers, will have a phasey see through quality. But if I close my eyes when listening to a piano from a distance (distant hall seat or whatever) there is an obvious solidity and power that the reproduction doesn't have.

There’s no question in my mind that the sound presentation of the Bose 901 more closely matches the perspective of being there at the symphony hall. There is clear stereo separation but not quite as three dimensional as a hifi setup.

Yet another aspect I mostly agree with. Though I seem to perceive imaging focus more strongly than many other people at symphonies, it's still different from much hi-fi playback. The reproduced sound is often squeezed down in to finer points of sound vs the real thing. But, getting at your Bose 901 comment, a constant difference I hear in real sound vs stereo playback is a sort of squeezed quality to the sound, including even the reverb. Like the whole sound has been sort of deformed to fit between the loudspeakers. Mechanical. Even good speaker imaging often fails to sound as open, as free, doesn't breath like real instruments being played in real space.

And trying to capture some of that quality, a combination of image localization but with an ease and openness more like the real thing, has been one of the things I focus on with my systems. And sometimes I'm startled by how close it manages to get.

 

[dasdoing]

not joining the topic, but I just wanted to remind people that a stereo recording is not supposed to sound like the instrument is in your room. you would need a totally dry (no ambiance) and probably mono recording to provide that sensation.

 

[dasdoing]

for a piano to have bass it needs to be looking

to old-school piano-fortes had bass, but they don't play loud enough

 

[MRC01]

..
While the rendering of the Grieg concerto was faultless and full of energy, I felt a bit disappointed : from my seat the piano was dearly lacking bass compared to any cd I play at home or what my wife plays on a much smaller Pleyel piano.

It would probably have been better if I had sat closer to the piano, but then I would have heard the violins and cellos far too loud compared to the rest of the orchestra.

Then I wondered : do I really strive for fidelity and want the same sound in my living room as at the concert ?

Altbough the emotions I got from that live performance were thrilling and invaluable, I actually prefer the more 'full' sound of the recording with a microphone close to the piano and the artificial piano/orchestra balance rendered by the mixing engineer.

Am I the only one ?
...

Classical music is better recorded than most other genres, with minimal compression and post processing. Most classical music recordings sound natural and lifelike. However, one thing commonly done with concertos is to amplify the soloist instrument at least twice as loud and prominent as it would be in a live performance. This makes it "easier to listen to" yet less natural. It's been common in recordings dating at least back to the 1960s and probably earlier. To be fair, it does enable you to hear more of the soloist's fine detail and technique, even if it is less realistic.

I do not like this; I prefer a natural lifelike recording. But I can tolerate it if it's done tastefully. As for where to sit, I usually listen to small ensembles so I prefer the front row. But for large ensemble music which I do attend occasionally if not often, more like the front-center, say 10-15 rows back.

 

[MRC01]

not joining the topic, but I just wanted to remind people that a stereo recording is not supposed to sound like the instrument is in your room. you would need a totally dry (no ambiance) and probably mono recording to provide that sensation.

Sure, and that's a good thing. Who wants it to sound like it's in your listening room? It should sound like the venue in which it was recorded. A cathedral, concert hall, or whatever. If your room is well prepared and tuned, it will impose less of itself on the sound and you'll hear what is in the recording. Even close miced recordings often have a more distant "ambient" mic mixed in to provide that sense of space.

 

[Chrispy]

IMO Davies Hall is tolerable if you sit in the first 10 rows and pretty bad from their back. The premium (most expensive) first balcony seats that they promote as the best are simply awful. Pianos sound like toy pianos from up there.

The most memorable experience there was my last, the 70th birthday celebration of Dan Hicks and many many special guests. There were hvac/noise issues.....did detract from a wonderful gathering overall.