Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Amateur vs Professional: Can YOU tell the difference?

I think a bigger reason for the probable discrepancy between the number of male and female great pianists in the past is the fact that during that time many more women stayed at home to raise a family. I think that today there is far less discrepancy among the sexes for pianists. There are certsinly female pianists getting to the finals of or even winning competitions.

In recent years, the Leeds Competition has been won by women playing Brahms concerti - which would have been a rarity for female pianists not too long ago.

It looks like the Brahms concerti are the best bet for women to win this particular competition, as no other concerto has made the grade .

All this is true, I never said women can't be concert pianists! But if one looks at the bigger picture, you would notice that men still generally dominate at concert pianist level and have more success wining competitions. The women who won Leeds this year is only the second to win in the competitions history! and this is a similar statistic throughout all the major competitions.

Men hands are on average one inch larger than women, which is clearly going to be an advantage at this highly competitive level. http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html

My conclusion would be the piano keyboard is ergonomically better suited for men than women...

+ 1

And it should be noted that a number of so-called "professional" pianists actually earn a living by teaching.

I agree. This is a semantic argument. Evaluate the differences in performances by all means, even study the effects of the presentation if you want. I'm positive if you did a large control study on two concert pianists and one charged double the other and had a nicer dress on it would get much better reviews even if it was the exact same sound. They're probably say the cocktails were better as well. Obviously what the performer is getting paid has nothing to do with how they send vibrations through the air though.

Are you talking pop?

In pop, looks (and gyrations, sex appeal, lack of clothing etc) are the thing. As in X Factor.

In classical, we listen to the music, and how it's performed. (Otherwise, why don't pretty women with nice dresses win competitions, in preference to ugly men?)

Plus it is unfair to consider much beyond the distant side view, since pianists rarely have a camera pointed up their noses (except on medci.tv). Seasoned classical listeners, if anything, are probably prejudiced against people who are attractive!

Lots of comments that I could respond to, many of which I agree with, including Bruce's. There's something in literature, I can't remember where, about "the concealment of art"*; I think it's true that professionals (I wish we could find some better terminology!) don't make us aware of the labors and struggles required to bring difficult music to performance. With amateurs on the other hand (I wish we could find some better terminology!), the attempts to meet technical challenges are sometimes more on display in a performance than the music itself. And of course it's the exceptions that prove the rule. Michael Cheung playing Messiaen, for example, would completely convince me that he's a pro if I didn't know otherwise, whereas there was one person at the 2013 Cliburn who seemed like he was in an ongoing struggle with every note, to the extent that one really couldn't hear any actual music. But these exceptions IMO are extremely rare.

Terminology: I only care about the "status", or whatever we want to call it, of a performer at the time of a performance. George Li, participating in a professional competition, is a professional, whatever he may have been in the past or will become in the future. Former conservatory-trained pianists who left professional music or at least gave up on their concert pianist aspirations but who now upload videos to YouTube and/or compete in amateur competitions or whatever are amateurs. There are undoubtedly some teachers who straddle the boundary. But the more I ponder this, the more sure I am that professional competence, for want of a better expression, is just like obscenity: I can't define it in words, but I know it when I see - or hear - it.


[Edit:
*ars est celare artem: "it is art to conceal art." That is, true art conceals the means by which it is achieved is a maxim from Ovid's Ars Amatoria. This means that in the best works of art the audience is not distracted by the artist's technique, but responds instead to the power of the work (as the artist intended). True art must appear artless . . . (http://www.alanemrich.com/Class/Class_Practical_Latin.htm)
I read a much better translation somewhere, along the lines of "great art entails the concealment of artistry". There's considerable controversy about the provenance of this maxim (see http://atrium-media.com/goldenthreads/arsestcelare.html), but whether it's from Ovid or just made up, I think it's as good of an aesthetic axiom as most.]

I don't see that as a difference between amateurs and professionals, but just one requirement of becoming a professional. It's more of an obsessive personality thing and those who have that kind of a personality are more likely to become professionals (at least in the classical world).

I am an amateur in every sense of the word (the quality of my playing and lack of need to support myself with music), but I feel the same way about music, never satisfied, always wanting to make it better. So I never finish anything, keep returning to the same pieces and work on them for months or years, often also starting from the beginning again, reviewing fingerings and rethinking my approach.

Sure that's what we like to think. But in such a subjective art I think it's fairly easy to assume there's a great many bias that goes into our appreciation. You could have the same person playing the same thing but have the Steinway logo covered up and people would think it sounds worse.

People are very easily swayed by this stuff. Check out the Joyce Hatto scam.

The ONLY AMATEUR that sounded professional to me is Christopher Shih.
All other amateur competition winners still sound amateurish.

Yes, this factor made me guess which was the professional in the OP video links even without watching them, just from seeing their posture in the stills.

I agree, and think the ways in which people's perception of classical music can be influenced by things other than the actual sounds they hear are many and complex. I think it is not too inaccurate to say that our perception of the music is always influenced by more than the actual sound we hear. Perhaps the closest we can get to "raw" is when we hear something by accident on the radio or some such situation, without knowing what the music is or who is performing it. But even then, all sorts of biases come into play - after all, people who don't like classical music are usually able to identify that it IS classical music almost instantly, and those of us who do like it are able to do the same. And so that is already a baseline bias.

All that, plus, how much you paid for the ticket to sit in the audience.

There are also differences between various levels of professionals that are very similar. I have more than once read or heard reviews that happened to compare some professionals, and the reviewer made the point that some professionals are simply operating at a level of artistic mastery that other professionals don't have (yet). Which isn't to say that the ones who don't have that mastery aren't ever worth hearing, I hasten to add.

I just listened to your example of Lara Fesdekjian.

If Chopin heard her play, he would say, "She does not know how to connect two notes together!" and I would add, she doesn't know how to connect two notes within the same chord.

In essence, Lara lacks the fine control of volume when she plays. I will give two graphs, and I will label them "good" and "bad", to emphasize that it has nothing to do with profession:


(These are two graphs of note volume over time)




Because of 'good' volume control, a small change in the volume level is easily heard, allowing for much subtlety.

With 'bad' volume control, gestures must be much more pronounced for anyone to notice.

Also, when Lara plays, the chords are clanking along in the left hand like a broken washing machine. (This is all my opinion though, please no one take it personally).

Let me try to understand your graph. If a piece has most of its notes played at mezzopiano. A professional would be able to make the decibel for mp the same throughout the piece.

An amateur may have mp in the beginning at a certain decibel but the mp fluctuates to a significantly higher/lower decibel as the piece progresses. When the mp is at a higher decibel, and the pianist needs to play a forte, the f becomes very loud and vice versa. If the mp has a lower decibel, the p and pp may not have enough space to be significantly softer and no difference in dynamics can be heard.

I think this is exactly right and is one aspect of how a pianist goes about defining, shaping, sustaining, and grading musical LINE (and not just melody) in performance. It relates to two other things, I think:

(1) Legato. You can tell an awful lot simply from how a performer connects the notes of a line or multiple lines (as in a chordal passage); a "good" rendering depends on the pianist physically connecting the notes, as an organist does. This is not the same as connecting them with the sustaining pedal - when someone does that, the result is clearly audible, even though amateurs may think it's not.

(2) Crescendo and diminuendo (especially the former). I am constantly being told off for "front-loading" crescendos and "peaking" early, which generally violates the integrity of the musical lines in a way that amateurs, I think, often don't realize. Again, it's a matter of control and shaping.

If you play truly legato (where appropriate, obviously, as for instance in the A theme of the ballade), your lines will always have a better chance of looking like phantom's "good" example. This in turn allows more scope for properly graded dynamic changes/contrasts and ultimately more expressiveness, or subtlety, as phantom indicates.

However, despite of all the valid, perceptive, and often very interesting points raised in this thread, I'm still thinking this may be more of a Gestalt thing, where even if you put all the "good" practices together, you still may not have the complete package.

That is correct, except:

Most pianos have a wide enough dynamic range that even a horribly uncontrolled performance won't run out of dynamic room.


So building on your point:
More subtle performance allows things like a slight accent to be noticed.
The left hand chords sound clanky because she doesn't have the control necessary to make them sound smooth (also, it should really be a dance between the left hand and right hand, but that's a different topic).

I don't think so. If you find a performance by an 'amateur,' the deficiencies can be pointed out and corrected. There's nothing magical about being professional.