Left/Right Orientation of Piano Recordings -- Any Preferences?

Piano's are positioned stage right so that the pianist can see the conductor and that the lid is positioned so that it can project the sound to the audience. 

Agreed @testpilot so when you actually listen in a concert the piano has little to no left right orientation at all as, excluding differences in lengths of the bass vs higher note wires the whole thing is just in one point on the stage for the ideal front center listener, this is usually how we hear many (not over miked) symphony recordings

but for solo or chamber music there are many other choices on where to put the mikes, are any that assume the pianist perspective therefore “wrong”?

I suppose I’ve not really thought about it all that much before for some reason, although generally I do like piano arranged width-wise where you can get the sense of the length of the instrument usually, as long as that does not overwhelm the presence of the other main instruments. But, about the only mic position I’ve heard that I dislike is when they put the mic inside the piano...typically results in a grotesquely larger than life piano sound IME and destroys the natural sense of scale and perspective associated with the instrument.

But once in a while, you find engineers who should know better than to do this who find themselves forced to for other considerations. Sometimes a young ’rising star’ of a classical pianist will come out of nowhere, as it were (self-taught), who manages to make the scene in the classical recording world. The only problem is that since they learned their skills at home or away from professional piano instructors, they seem to pick up a rather bad habit along the way - that is, they hum while they are playing. And this ain’t no 60-Hz hum, if you know what I mean. And they usually hum quite loudly and throughout the entirety of everything they play! So ingrained is the habit that they seem unable to play in silence. So the engineers resort to the only trick to cover that up that they know - with the piano lid closed. I have at least one or two examples of that and underneath the performance you can still plainly hear them humming away.

Cheers

My biggest issue with piano recordings has less to do with position or even the close mic'ing that can result in an exaggerated size of the instrument, but instead the lack of gravitas, power and harmonics that a concert grand can deliver. Many recordings sound too "lightweight" for the instrument and even when close mic'd, don't seem to reproduce the either the depth of the bass registers or the fully range of harmonic overtones that linger as the sound of one struck note decays while another is playing.
One of the best (in the sense of realistic) recordings I have is Claudine Meyers  Salute to Bessie Smith. It is a little meandering, and the vocal parts can sound overloaded (though this seems to be less an issue as my system improved). What is compelling is the heft of the instrument along with a very complete aural picture of the harmonic overtones. (The performance may not be to everyone's taste and the copy I'm referring to is the original Leo Records pressing, not the later audiophile remaster).