and stumbled upon this master piece:

Just thought I'd share my discovery. I think I'll have to learn this piece as soon as possible, doesn't sound as impossible as some of the other etudes(all the more beautiful though).

I love this piece so much. Here is me playing it, not perfectly but hey ho

These etudes are so underplayed

Beautiful! I love this performance!

LOVE THIS PIECE. Learning it was a pain though - that beautiful tenor voice which appears in 3 sections, accompanied by a right hand double note figuration in staccato, is ridiculously hard to voice, with all of those giant (2 octaves!!!) chords.

Also check out the D minor from the op. 39 set.

This one might be my favorite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI0CBsZHN14

I listened to your recording and enjoyed it thoroughly. Very nice dynamical control and you bring out the inner melodies nicely. Well done.

Great job on a gorgeous piece, debrucey. I've been meaning to study it for a long time, and you may just have inspired me to quit dawdling and get down to work. I've played around with it enough to appreciate what rough sledding it is both technically and musically, and you do a masterful job of controlling the dynamics while creating nice balance between the treble melody and the tenor voice rolling beneath it. Congratulations, and keep those posts coming.

That tenor voice made me have nightmares lol

I'm not surprised, but you certainly figured it out. I also wanted to compliment you on the visuals you put on YouTube with this recording. The paintings were very soothing, and how about those paws of Rachmaninoff! He looks like he could palm a basketball with three fingers.

I noticed the link to your YouTube channel and clicked over to have a look. The Dutilleux "Blackbird" is an intriguing piece (sounding here and there like Messiaen's "Catalogue des Oiseaux") and I thought your approach to it was superb. I've ordered it and look forward to trying it on.

Finally, I discovered a wealth of other video recordings on your YouTube site, from Bach to Prokofiev and beyond. If anyone else here enjoyed your Rachmaninoff as much as I did, they'd be well advised to give it a listen.

Even if it's at a slightly worse quality, if you are going to listen to Etude Tableau Op. 39 No. 5, you need to listen to Horowitz play it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGqVrdeLZLo&feature=related

+1.

As long as we're switching lanes from Opus 33 (the OP's original focus) to Opus 39, here's a link to my favorite of all the Rachmaninoff Etudes Tableaux, played by one of my favorite pianists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyW9vLKy4ik&feature=related

That's my fave etude tableau too. I must relearn it soon.

Emanuel, very beautiful piece thanks for pointing it out.

Ok, so i printed the sheet music for op. 33 no 4, excited to start practicing. Unfortunately my excitement died somewhat prematurely after looking at the first page. There are some monstrous chords in the left hand throughout the entire piece. Here are some of the first ones i noticed (marked with rectangular): imageshack
Can all of these be rolled or changed?
The first one is doable if I stretch my fingers to their limit. The second one is surely supposed to be rolled. Third one is impossible and the fourth again barely within reach.
I read somewhere that even though Rachmaninoff had huge hands he wrote music that didn't require big hands, guess it wasn't true.

You may choose to roll some of those chords/intervals, and split others (where the bottom note is played prior to the top 2-3 notes). To my ear, rolling all of them does not sound appropriate, but the large stretches definitely call for some creativity and dexterity to play.

Later on in the piece, you may find the sostenuto pedal (the middle one) to be of great use as well.

Good luck!

- Silence

I play the open 5th at the base of the chord and the top note of the chord separately, it helps bring out the tenor voice better. If you roll the whole chord it can spoil the march like character.

I think that in general he really didn't write for hands as huge as his own, but that doesn't mean he wrote for a small hands, either. There are definitely places in his music where a big hand can be a good thing. But, considering how gigantic his hands were, a surprising amount of his music seems to stay within fairly normal bounds.

I wonder if he himself could actually reach every single one of the huge spans that sometimes turn up in his music. After all, it is not some unheard-of thing for a composer to write spans and stretches unplayable as written and to leave it up to the performer how to break them into manageable bits. Schumann did it, for one.

Silent Omen, debrucey and wr thanks for the helpful replies. I'll have to see what sounds best but splitting them up seems like a good idea.