# Recordings vs Live performances of Classical Music



## Mario Martinez (Jul 16, 2015)

Say you have tickets for a full season of piano concerts at you local auditorium.

Imagine that for every concert the pianists play the same pieces, on the same piano, tuned the exact same way and placed at the same position on the stage. Furthermore the public that attends the concert is always the same and you always seat at the same spot on the auditorium.

If you close you eyes to listen to the sound produced by these different pianists you will find that even though everything else remains constant every pianist is able to produce a unique sound different from the sound of the other pianists.

The only responsible agent for that difference in sound is the pianist himself. So it would be safe to think that any difference on dynamic range (from pianissimo to forte), balance (left vs right hand and middle voices), color (with more or less harmonics), sound presence, etc would be a product of his/her technical ability to exploit the resources of the instrument.

If you attended all the concerts you would end up having a well formed opining about each one of those pianists and how they compare to one another.

Now, imagine every pianist brought his own crew to record his own concert. Imagine we never attended those concerts and we only heard the recordings: Do you think you would have gotten to the same conclusions?

To put it another way: If all those different recording crews simultaneously made their own recording of one single concert: Would all those recordings sound the same to you?


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Yeah I would reach the same conclusions. I can hear pieces and separate the sound engineering from the performance.


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