Topic: Nice International Piano Competition -practising with Pianoteq helpful
Since using Pianoteq for a seminar this year on piano tuning http://hammerwood.mistral.co.uk/program...eminar.pdf I've been a bit busy tuning real pianos.
Pianoteq does something for pianos that most conventional piano tuners won't do - and that's to use unequal temperaments.
Unequal temperaments are really important to the instrument and this is very largely to do with the ability to get harmonics aligned with scale notes. This affects the way in which the sustaining pedal can be used. Both Chopin and Beethoven specified sustain to be held down for many bars. This requires different playing techniques to those commonly around nowadays, and ideally different tuning so that the sustain pedal doesn't create an almighty mush.
The result of mush from the sustain means that many pianists use the pedal with each note on each beat sometimes, as a matter of mere amplification of that note. This leads to what we call "vertical" playing, and the "line" of the melody is lost. So much music derives from singing, but fewer people sing nowadays, preferring ear-drugs fed with Beyoncé and the like. So we're losing the song in music. I used to think that every note on a Steinway interrupted the music. But then I discovered it wasn't the piano - it's the style of playing that results from the instrument not having provided the performer with reward for listening to the sound and finding beauty.
A senior professor at Trinity College of music tells me that often she has to ask pupils who come to her if they consider their piano to be their friend. She then asks them if they would hit their friend . . . And this summer I tuned for a concert given by a well acclaimed award winning young Korean pianist which was simply unpleasant in the manner in which he hit the piano.
Ancient pianos give the clue to Haydn for instance. Haydn should not be played staccato as so many do - it should sing. But all too often we hear abrupt notes that might just as well be Prokofiev. The ancient pianos didn't have good dampers . . . . so they sang and the sustain merely enhanced a little what the piano did by itself. The playing of modern pianos has to achieve the same effect.
It's for these sorts of reasons that cognoscenti who are running piano competitions are turning to a changed piano tuning that I do - based on Kellner but specifically adjusted for more resonance and high definition of the sound.
Nice this year was the first to do so and the result was a significant success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnTDkj5dYYc was the gala concert and final for the concerto with orchestra. The orchestra were shocked to find that they and the piano, for the first time they'd experienced, were at the same pitch. As well as Sohyun Park and Solo Grand Prize winner Anri Manabe who shone, at the end of the video I've included the winner of the Junior prize, 8 year old David Martinescu from Romania. He played Bach superbly, and knowing what he could do and what the piano tuned by me could do for him, at the prize giving I asked him to play the piano as if it was the organ in a cathedral - with the whole piece with the sustain pedal down, on one pedal.
Having been given the clue, many performers adapted to the piano, used the sustain pedal for longer and more freely, and let their instrument sing.
Whilst users of conventionally tuned pianos can't do that so easily, Pianoteq users can set Well Temperament and have an idea of how the real instrument behaves a little, and practice with more sustain and singing to their playing.
Pianist Adolfo Barabino explains how one note should not interrupt the previous note in good phrasing and his masterclasses are transformatory https://www.adolfobarabino.com/masterclass .
Best wishes
David P
