Good to see some interest in the player piano, but perhaps I might clarify one or two details. If you heard Grainger playing the Grieg, and you don't live in the Antipodes, then I will have organised the concert. You will find many other posts from me on this forum, though I have been silent for rather a long time. We took our Duo-Art Pianola to Norway a few years back, and Grainger's performance is now on CD, accompanied by the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rolf Gupta.
Reproducing pianos are not especially restricted in dynamics, and certainly not as restricted as many of the younger generation of pianists, who, thanks to the ubiquitous piano competitions, tend to play very uniformly and accurately, but without the emotional sensitivity or variety of their predecessors of a hundred years ago. Indeed we live in an emotionally challenged world, where I regret that audiences increasingly go to concerts to watch, rather than to listen. That's why conductors and pianists who wave their arms around a lot, or who make big eyes at the TV cameras in deference to their perceived beauty of their own playing, are generally more successful than their more restrained counterparts.
It's not true that all the notes playing at the same time on a reproducing piano are actuated with the same dynamic force. The mechanisms are split into two main sections, for treble and bass, with two separate dynamic channels in parallel. The dynamic variations can be very fast, too, and given the style of playing from a hundred years ago, which was was far less rigid than it is today, especially in the matter of tempo rubato, then there was very little loss of fidelity, and certainly rather less than that caused by the horns and soundboxes of pre-electric gramophones.
Why would you think that perforated paper would be an insensitive medium? You probably haven't really thought about it in detail. The sort of roll you have illustrated is not from a reproducing piano in any case, but from a normal player piano. It's the main theme from The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss, on an old 65-note roll. Rolls for the normal player piano were not originally designed for reproducing someone else's performance. It's a modern fetish that people like to listen only to other people's renditions. Back in the 1900s what many of them wanted was to make their own music, but without the need for pressing the keys by hand.
If you don't understand why it might take years of experience to play sensitively on any instrument, player piano or otherwise, then what do you think music making is about? If all there is to the piano is accuracy and speed, what point is there in listening to human beings? You might just as well have a computer do the lot and stick to gin and tonic. But of course accuracy is only a mechanical building block. It's the subtlety of interpretation that makes the music, and that is just as difficult on any instrument. That takes all sorts of human qualities, not the least of which is humility, in my view, which is why so many rather well-known pianists fail to appeal to my taste.
Anyway, I should give you a couple of audio examples, shouldn't I?
To demonstrate the contrast between an atrociously regulated and played Pianola, and a reasonable one, I choose first, a YouTube clip from something calling itself the Prichard Collection. There are several in the series, and this one is pretty representative. It's awful, and the man pedalling hasn't a clue what he is talking about:
The player talks of using subduing levers as though they create accents, which they don't, and in any case he fails to create any accents at all. He states that one should pedal uniformly, which is rubbish, and by dint of pushing his two favourite levers across with the wrong hand, he manages to turn them into a sort of soft pedal, so that the music is churned out at roughly two dynamic levels, forte and mezzoforte. The piano needs both tuning and toning as well! It's a travesty of a wonderful instrument, but it's on YouTube, so everyone tends to believe it must be true.
The other example risks suggesting that I am, like many of the pianists whom I have castigated, lacking in humility, since it comes from a concert I gave last autumn. Oh well, I daresay my friends will vouch for me. It's exactly the same sort of metronomic roll as in the YouTube example, but in this case it's the Rachmaninov Prelude, Op. 23, no. 4. It's not perfect - nothing in life ever is - but I hope it will show you that the normal player piano can be played sensitively. I'll attach it at the foot of this posting.
You'll find a few examples of good reproducing pianos on the Pianola Institute channel on YouTube, but it's like crying in the wind, since there are so very many bad examples which get all the attention. Life is like that, and if you really want to find the truth out about stuff, you have to dig for a long time.
Recording rolls for reproducing pianos is a subject that could fill many books, since there were so many varieties, all of which did it in different ways. I'm currently in the middle of writing a series of articles for the Pianola Journal, on Dynamic Recording for the Reproducing Piano. Alas, the musical and musicological world is atrociously ill-informed about player pianos, and I more or less despair of being able to get the message across. I can't think of any other instrument that is so widely misrepresented and misunderstood.
By the way, before I went to university in the autumn of 1967, I spent a gap year at the Decca Record Company, mainly editing classical recordings on tape. If you think piano roll editors were the leaders at such corrections, think again! Absolutely every CD and LP is edited to remove wrong notes, and indeed far more than most piano rolls, in my experience. I remember that one of the editing engineers worked out that Decca's 1960s version of Tosca had an average of one tape edit every four seconds. Even then they could occasionally add top notes missed by a soprano, but how about the Saint-Saëns Third Symphony with the Berlin Phil and the organ of Notre Dame. That's music made in different countries, edited together by engineering wizards. By those standards, piano rolls are a model of authenticity!
Best wishes to you all.
Topic: Player Piano Reproductions of Rachmaninov, Mahler, etc.