Fortepianos and Modern Grand Pianos

[BBMmk2]

There's been some discussion here, of late about music that's played, either on period instruments, or modern equivalents.

I have highlighted the above mentioned, in the title, and my ears,no matter what, have not sem to grasp the sounds of the fortepiano but I always am glad to hear the same music being playing on a modern grand.

Thoughts?

[Bryn]

There's been some discussion here, of late about music that's played, either on period instruments, or modern equivalents.

I have highlighted the above mentioned, in the title, and my ears,no matter what, have not sem to grasp the sounds of the fortepiano but I always am glad to hear the same music being playing on a modern grand.

Thoughts?

My first thought is that you are not hearing the same music, but, in effect, an arrangement. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but on the whole I would prefer to hear the music played using instruments which respond and sound close the what the composer would have expected at the time of composition. Very often the more even timbre of a modern piano hides exploitation of the varying timbre with pitch range carefully employed by the composer. To hear, for instance, the Moonlight Sonata played on a decent fortepiano by musician such as Ronald Brautigam or Malcom Binns is something of a revelation regarding Beethoven's exploration of the instrument's characteristics. I think it highly likely that composers who wrote with the fortepianos of the time in mind would have written rather differently had they had a modern pianoforte at their disposal.

[verismissimo]

I've never seen the need to choose, Brassie.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If you don't like the sound of the Fortepiano, Bbm, then you don't like the sound of a Fortepiano: there's nothing more to add. Plenty of excellent recordings and performances using the modern Grand for this not to be a problem: the insights of Schnabel, Kempff, Gilels, Pollini et al have their own remarkable rewards.

But, as Bryn says, this isn't the sound the composers imagined when they wrote the works, and for those of us interested in getting as close as we humanly can to those imagined sounds, the instruments the composer used are the best means of achieving them. And, boy, do those last Beethoven Sonatas benefit from the nuances that a contemporary piano offer!

[ardcarp]

Maybe one should also bear in mind also that there isn't just one sort of forte-piano. There are models from different dates, different countries and from different makers. In other words there is much more variety of timbre in early pianos. The sort of differences modern pianists find between (say) Steinways, Faziolis and Bosendorfers are insignificant compared with the family of animals coming under the umbrella of 'forte-pianos'.

Leaving aside fortepianos, there is a whole range of pianos (e.g.Broadwoods, Erards and Pleyels) dating from the middle and late 19th century whose sound is somewhat different from the modern instrument, and it is fascinating to hear the Romantic repertoire played on them. BBM, they are not nearly so twangy and rudimentary as the fortepianos which you can't get your head/ears around, so do give them a go:

e.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGmAeSuLPb0

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3HHhqwNv8

[David-G]

Thanks for the links. I love piano music of this period played on this sort of instrument. Compared with the modern Steinway there is so much more delicacy, clarity, and differentiation between the different registers.

In the same vein, I love Emanuel Ax’s recordings of the Chopin concerti with the OAE:

http://www.amazon.com/Chopin-Piano-Concerto-No-Variations/dp/B00000I9G7/ref=pd_sim_m_1

http://www.amazon.com/Chopin-Concerto-Fantasia-Grande-Polonaise/dp/B000007TJV/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

[Bryn]

Thanks for the links. I love piano music of this period played on this sort of instrument. Compared with the modern Steinway there is so much more delicacy, clarity, and differentiation between the different registers.

In the same vein, I love Emanuel Ax’s recordings of the Chopin concerti with the OAE:

http://www.amazon.com/Chopin-Piano-Concerto-No-Variations/dp/B00000I9G7/ref=pd_sim_m_1

http://www.amazon.com/Chopin-Concert...=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

They look enticing, but the shipping from over the pond makes a nonsense of the $0.98 for the 1st. I have ordered the 2nd via the uk site (around a fiver including p&p) to supplement the excellent performances by Dang Thai Son/Orch. of the 18th Century/Bruggen in 'The Real Chopin' box which a few of us here managed to get for around £12 (including p&p) a couple of years or so back.

[BBMmk2]

Thanks Ardcarp. I have heard a pleyel live at one of those specialist evening a t a national Trust recital, and quite like the pleyel. The pianist says that this was used by Chopiun. But, how definitive the history of this, one cannot be too sure, on these occaisions?

[salymap]

When I first worked at Augener we were in a very old building, the top floor of which was the Salle Erard concert room, visited by Corno de Bassetto aka GBS.

We often took our lunch time break up there and there was a very old Erard piano, dirty and neglected but still beautiful somehow, It sounded awful after years of silence but I longed to hear it as it had been.

Don't pianos of that type have a softer tone than forte-pianos,which always seem a little hard to my ignorant ears.

Where is waldhorn, who knows all there isto know on the subject ?

[Dave2002]

They look enticing, but the shipping from over the pond makes a nonsense of the $0.98 for the 1st. I have ordered the 2nd via the uk site (around a fiver including p&p) to supplement the excellent performances by Dang Thai Son/Orch. of the 18th Century/Bruggen in 'The Real Chopin' box which a few of us here managed to get for around £12 (including p&p) a couple of years or so back.

Could that set be worth having, even at its current prices - maybe £60-70 new or under £50 second hand? http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-Cho...he+real+chopin

[ahinton]

My first thought is that you are not hearing the same music, but, in effect, an arrangement. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but on the whole I would prefer to hear the music played using instruments which respond and sound close the what the composer would have expected at the time of composition. Very often the more even timbre of a modern piano hides exploitation of the varying timbre with pitch range carefully employed by the composer. To hear, for instance, the Moonlight Sonata played on a decent fortepiano by musician such as Ronald Brautigam or Malcom Binns is something of a revelation regarding Beethoven's exploration of the instrument's characteristics. I think it highly likely that composers who wrote with the fortepianos of the time in mind would have written rather differently had they had a modern pianoforte at their disposal.

I'm not so sure about that, actually. Yes, of course it's interesting to hear 19th century works played on the kinds of 19 century instruments that the composers had at their disposal, provided that the players understand sufficiently the approaches to and conventions of playing that might have been the accepted norm at the time - and, up to a point, I take your point here insofar as it goes.

The problem for me, however - perhaps not quite so much with, say, Mendelssohn but certainly with Schumann and even more with Chopin and Liszt and perhaps more still with Alkan - is that the demands that some of these composers' works made on keyboard instruments and players seem so often to suggest a need for and aspirations toward a new kind of instrument. The harmonic developments in Chopin, particularly in the works of his final period, can imply the need for greater sustaining power than hitherto, the rise of the public concert suggested the requirement for instruments with greater powers of projection, the extremes of bravura in Liszt and Alkan suggest the need for a more robust design of instrument and a wider pitch range Alkan's not infrequent recourse to dense bass sonorities (not to mention even Beethoven's in some of his late works) call for the kind of tonal clarity unavailable on most of the instruments of the day.

Whether or not or to what extent the above might be seen as merely my own personal view of the situation, the evidence is nevertheless clear that, by the time of the deaths of Liszt and Alkan in the latter 1880s, the piano had developed into an instrument not so dissimilar to that to which we are accustomed today - it is fair to say that fewer significant design changes that altered the kind of sound that can be made on a piano have occurred in the century and a quarter since then, the modern Bösendorfer 290 perhaps being the most notable example of those that have occurred.

I once heard the late and much lamented Ronald Smith playing Chopin's Op. 10 nos. 1 & 3 on an Érard of the kind with which Chopin would have been familiar at the time of writing and then on a fine modern Steinway D; there was no faulting his performances, which were electrifying in themselves, yet that on the Érard suggested to me that the instrument was struggling hard to cope with Chopin's adventurous and imaginative tearing up of the rule book. I suspect that his performance of Alkan's Concerto on the same pair of instruments might have risked bringing forward the earlier one's impending demise...

And, after all that, there's always Robert Simpson's memorable comment that we cannot listen to Bach today as people did in Bach's day because we have listened to Xenakis (and I think that this is the only occasion on which I can recall Simpson referring to the latter composer!)...

[Phileas]

Inspired by this thread, I'm now listening to the Moonlight Sonata played by Ronald Brautigam.

[verismissimo]

... And, after all that, there's always Robert Simpson's memorable comment that we cannot listen to Bach today as people did in Bach's day because we have listened to Xenakis (and I think that this is the only occasion on which I can recall Simpson referring to the latter composer!)...

Does this have any meaning beyond the obvious, I wonder? And why Xenakis?

[Bryn]

Could that set be worth having, even at its current prices - maybe £60-70 new or under £50 second hand? http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-Cho...he+real+chopin

For 21 CDs (not all crammed full, it's true) and a wide range of highly accomplished pianist (plus Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century in the works with orchestra) I would indeed recommend the set. In addition to the 20 CDs of modern digital recordings, the set opens with a CD of historic live recording of Raul Koczalski from the 1948.

[ahinton]

Does this have any meaning beyond the obvious, I wonder? And why Xenakis?

I suppose that the answer to your first question would have to depend in part on foreknowledge of precisely what you mean by "the obvious" (since that might not necessarily be the same as it would for everyone) but that to your second would almost certainly have had to be provided by Simpson himself, who is sadly no longer with us to be asked...