Longer post:
Most modern recs are edited to death.
Da engineer mofos tend to favor a setup which captures the least amount of natural ambience, so they can potentially splice anyfuckinwhere, at da artists whim.
Recording the piano up-close does not capture a piano tone naturally at all, as the piano tone forms more than 6 feet out from the open lid.
Most of the record companies then apply a shitty digital reverb (I’m thinking of YOU, Hyperion) to cover the bar-by-bar editing, further distorting the piano tone into the musical equivalent of a smoothed-over Instagram thot CATFISHING yo azz.
Some of the BEST modern recs are the ones from live radio broadcast, which are recorded with natural ambience from da hall.
The problem with da recorded sound really started from the late 50’s (look at da over edited Horowitz official recs starting from 1954 or so), when artists wanted to fully use the capability of INTRUSIVE EDITING:
The live Horowitz bootlegs from the 1960’s, recorded out in the hall on good reel-to-reel recorders, truly capture his tone and artistry far better than the overedited frankstein recs released by Columbia.
Lastly, many pianos (Yamaha CFX, what the FUCK) now are voiced for maximum “projection” and an almost “digi” sort of vibe in terms of sheer brightness, to the extent that the more mellow colors are lost (this is true for the Horowitz piano as well, I far prefer his recordings 1928-1936 done on a normal, non juiced-up piano).
Diz legendary Abbey Road studio is where da great 1930’s-50’s recs were made by Cortot, Horowitz, Moiseiwitsch, Lipatti (I don’t consider him a “golden age great”), Friedman (dat chop nocturne was recorded in that studio, as Columbia used HMV’s studio space for that session) and others.