But my ears…
The people at the back can pay as little as 10€ for a ticket, whilst I can pay up to 110€. You should get what you pay for, and I didn’t pay to get my eardrums blown out. I also find that people who focus on projection are incapable of playing a tru pianissimo.
Playing loud doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t combine it with playing very soft. That’s what pianoforte playing is all about - making dynamic contrasts. When you are able to make endless gradations between ppp-pp-p then your fortissimos will sound thunderous in comparison. Gieseking and Horowitz were undisputed masters in that.
Also (and related to this), when you just “hit the keys” you will get an ugly fortissimo that sounds very loud when you stand close to the piano but doesn’t sound loud at all when you move a couple of meters away…it doesn’t “carry”. Howeva when you use gravity, elasticity and relaxation the right way, you’ll get a more “prolonged”, “full sounding” forte that never sounds harsh.
You can be 2.20 and weigh 150 kilos but if your technique is tense and limited, the sound in big passages will be just ugly.
Tru!
Howevah, da HO could truly unleash sum extra high decibel sheeyat 
Randomly, da loudest pianists of all tym wuz pozz:
Ho, Nazi, Richter, Gilels, Berman
Hai, and Horosan wasn’t exactly a heavyweight - so making a huge sound is not only about size & weight.
Listening to da Grin-yuck in Schumann, wow, don’t like it at all, last mvmt. sloppy and ugly. No sense of style.
But yeah his octaves in Chop are amazingly fast.
Grynyuk is somewhat of an enigma…
He can play remarkably polished:
I don’t think you can assess how loud someone played through recordings.
Good point. True, you don’t get the complete “picture”, even if the recording is very well made.
One can asses (sic) through da sheer level of distortion
Also, in audience recs - you can tell VERY well
No you can’t, I’ve made enough of them to tell you that’s not true.
Tru?
E.g. Trifonov, I could barely hear him but I boosted the volume enough so it doesn’t sound like it. On the other hand, Tsujii was so loud he hurt my ears, but you can’t tell from the recording. Audience rcs give you the dynamic range, but it’s scaled. You can’t tell the volume in an absolute sense unless you were in the hall.
Yeah, I’m with Brew - mostly anyway. I think you can tell the relative aspect well enough from an audience recording, especially one made from far away, but you still don’t get an accurate sense of the absolute sound level. The “sound” of a pianist in general is really difficult to capture actually, and the sound my ears have heard in a hall is often surprisingly different from the sound the mics have picked up. I think it’s since there’s a lot of real-time psychoacoustics going on which the brain switches off when it knows it’s being “fooled”, and since you create the sound picture from reflexes and maybe even visual information from around the hall to determine distances, filter out what’s unimportant etc, while the mics are more “dumb” and simply monotonously register what reaches them. This is where placement comes in, too - the mics are rarely precisely where a pair of ears would be, and with audience recordings both channels are normally blocked south instead of east/west. Professional recordings normally aren’t blocked in any direction. Makez difrenzes.
Right now I’m at the concert of a pianist who doesn’t project at all.
Even in the first row his forte is a very gentle mezzo forte.
He’s 100% reliant on the acoustics to make sure people in the nosebleed can hear him.
hahahahahah da MOTEL
ztill wankin 5 tymez a day lyk when he wuz 16
AHAHAHAHAHAHA FUCKKKKKKKK
REZPEC fo uzin both handz tho 
hahaha daim dis concert hall lookz like sheeyat