Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Balance problems in piano concerti

^ Well yes, the texture looks good, but is it feasible to project it clearly as written, without modifying even the dynamics slightly?

To put my query in another way, if a pianist plays a bunch of harmonically clashing/ seemingly random/"atonal" notes in the Prokofiev or Grieg codas and the audience doesn't notice because the piano is literally inaudible -- well, that doesn't speak well about the orchestration, does it?

Or, if a pianist plays a bunch of wrong notes during a tutti, does the piano make a sound?

1. The dynamics depend on a lot of factors. First of all we should remember that forte and piano are rather relative terms. Your upright piano in your home will have a different reaction to the same velocity to my grand piano, or a Steinway grand in Disney hall.

2. We should keep in mind that the hall and the size of the orchestra also matters. A lot of classical works do not have exact sizes for the strings, which creates several issues...

3. Finally we need to remember that each one hears things differently in the end, especially depending on where we sit, etc...

So in the case of Prokofiev I do think that his idea was for the piano to act like one of the woodwinds in that instance (same as in the early stages of the cadenze, where it takes the place of the strings). And I think that this works. I think that if someone played something totally off in the coda it would show... I think...

It remains to be tried I guess... Anyone up for the task?

^ I'll grant you that the Prokofiev coda looks better on paper than the Grieg coda, where the piano's flourishes are independent and undoubled.

One reason why I wish Mahler had written a piano concerto is because it most likely would've been finely balanced, even if he had decided to use a massive orchestra with, say, quadruple winds.

Absolutely, I completely agree. I took a different tack in my post, but I don't deny this at all.

I think you're underestimating how loud and piercing the trombones actually are in that register. You can hear the pianist only in studio recordings, and then only the very highest notes and nothing in the middle.

I'm too lazy to go through the score and pick out all the problem spots, but my general impression of Prokofiev's 5th piano concerto is that it has many places, mostly brief, where the piano can't be heard. Sometimes it seems that might be an intentional effect, but it's hard to say, because a lot of the writing for both the piano and the orchestra is fairly unusual. But I remember being surprised at a live concert at how often the piano was simply obliterated, usually by the brass.

And it's worth mentioning that the balances of everything in the Classical era were quite different than what we hear today when we listen to a modern orchestra and the soloist is using some big concert grand, and the hall is relatively vast. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were not writing their concertos for those forces and environment. Mozart, in fact, performed all of his concertos on harpsichord as well as on fortepiano, hard as that may be for us to imagine.

Thanks. My guess is that the third movement could be especially problematic. I only have the two piano reduction, so I can't see the scoring problems firsthand -- best I can do is listen to recordings.