Rachmaninoff in a Classical Well Tempered Tuning 

Some years back, l was reading up on Rachmaninov. He claimed that, during his formative years of piano study, his piano was in a well-temperament and that, when confronted with an equal-tempered instrument, he mentally visualised the tuning he was accustomed to from his youth. Thank you for your wonderful and informative videos. I find the Young Temperament very convincing and wish you lived only a suburb away so l could beg you to tune my aging piano and make it forever Young. Greetings from Australia.

That sounds amazing. I'd love to hear the intro in neighbouring keys (G minor and A minor) to get a feel for the differences. I'd heard a few people describe keys as having different qualities in non-ET tunings, but have been playing in standard tuning for so long that the concept is foreign to me, despite having some sense of absolute pitch.

Perfect work to demonstrate your point! Wonderful playing!

Beautifully played, by the way!

Wonderful temperament! I need to try some of these well temperaments on my 1906 Mason & Hamlin AA.

I am a huge fan of unequal temperaments. Fortunately I have a piano tuner nearby in Zürich that is able to tune any kind of temperament with TuneLab . I am exploring around a lot with different tunings. Every 9 months or so I let it tune in a different temperament. I started with a crazy tuning that had a completely pure major 3rd and a completely pure 5th in C. The keys with many accidentals sounded quite "sour", obviously. But the keys with few accidentals have sounded a bit too calm for my taste. So currently I have my piano tuned in Werckmeister III, and it sounds so "happy" and warm. Next round I want to try the Bach - Lehmann temperament and experience the secret (?) of the tuning scheme (most probably) on the front page of Bach's "Das wohltemperierte Klavier". I'll see to where my journey through different temperaments will lead me. But one thing is just a fact by now: I simply can't stand equal tuning anymore. It's too boring to my ears, now that I have discovered temperament. 🤩

wow this is a very interesting lesson! Thank you so much!

This tuning makes so much more sense for this piece. Thank you!

That punch line though 😂

PPS which well tuning did you use? (Prince again?) PPPS Beautiful!

Another thing, often overlooked by players, is voicing of the piano. There's a famous story about Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (ABM) preparing for his first performance in Carnegie Hall. Relative to European music halls, with some 2,000 seats it is about twice as large as a large one, this side of the pond. ABM was afraid that the sound of the piano would lose some of the overtones (sparkle) and ordered his tuner to make the piano brighter. Which the tuner did. Then ABM tested it and wanted brighter. This may have been repeated two more times or so. The morning after the concert, one of the leading US newspapers (like WP or NYT) had the review, paraphrased here: ABM played beautifully but his piano was awfully bright. ABM was afraid that 2,000 people, women in fur coats, would suck the sparkle out of his sound. Two lessons: (a) they did not suck the light out of the music, (b) "voicing" can totally change an instrument. This is all about the felt on the hammers, its shape and compactness or fluffiness. Or, an idea for a video along these lines?

I still remember the piano tuner that visited my home to tune mother's piano mentioning he would changed to a slightly different tuning. IIRC in the late 1960s. This video's demonstration makes total sense - thank you for that. And I feel it should be obligatory for pianists in music conservatories to rehearse-play some reference pieces on instruments with old action designs and well-tempered tuning, preferably with middle A at the frequency of the time. No, I don't prefer the sound of old instruments, but it informs about the (technical) character of a composition and hence may influence artistic interpretation. To my modern instrument preference, I have to add, though, that playing a subtle Chopin piece that never gets louder than ff on a Steinway D in a large concert hall where ff needs to be played as fff - totally sucks, especially when a world famous pianist drives the D into what's called "clipping" in electronics.

Notice the preponderance of the perfect fifths and fourths in this piece. Only well temperaments would have justly tuned fifths that Rachmaninoff used in this piece. Equal tempered fifths are almost pure, but they are still tempered enough to lose the resonance that comes with a justly tuned fifth. Because of the purity of the fifths in the right hand, the left hand tends to be interpreted more melodically, which works well in this key because the minor tonality becomes more Pythagorean-like, with flattened 3rd, 6th, and 7th degree notes of the scale. In equal temperament, the relation is lost because the dissonance in a G# minor triad is contributed both by the 3rd and the 5th. In well temperament, only the minor 3rd contributes, and thus its character is more easily heard.

5:55 crazy how that D sounds very flat in this tuning

Is is possible that Horowitz´ piano was tuned well tempered? He has a unique crisp in his performances unlike other pianists in his era, so it cant be the recording setup, right?

There's a recording of rachmaninoff (Not a piano roll) playing one of his pieces. Is it in the well tempered tuning? I can't exactly tell: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cFubuY7flCo.html

Aren't there recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own music? PS he played them super fast, no?

It’s wonderful to see others using unequal temperaments. Young or Valotti are not my favourite though, they aren’t quite pure enough in the home keys for my liking. Streets ahead of nasty and lifeless Equal though.

I'm not sure if Rachmaninoff used this Tuning or Equal Temperment, because he forgot to write it down in a note.

440 hrz or 432 hrz?

Why do so few western musicians and musicologists neglect the commonly held Russian belief that Rachmaninoff was heavily influenced by the technology and sound of bells, church bells?

Right hand opening figure is too loud and the left hand is too soft.

Sounds the exact same. The whole "still still agitated" stuff is just you deluding yourself conciously, you don't actually unconciously recognize that when hearing the music.