famous pianists cheating

[birba]

Thanks for the info
Now, how can you "fake hands together"?  Either you have octaves or you don't.  And here you've already got octaves in both hands.  It's what comes after that's hard.  Are you talking about the prestissimo?

[ahinton]

I'm guessing MAH means Hamelin?

Oui, c'est vrai.

Best,

Alistair

[anda]

i don't think changing hands distribution (whether it envolves eliminating jumps or not) counts as cheating - i mean, as long as you observed the text and the subtext, who cares how you played this or that note? speaking on behalf of the audience (since most of the time i'm in the audience and not on stage), i couldn't care less if you use your nose to play a note, as long as i get the work i paid to hear.

personally, i "cheat" by changing hands distribution all the time - sometimes cause i can't reach a 10th, sometimes cause it allows me to separate voices and makes it easier to underline a melodic line or a theme, sometimes just cause it's easier to play like that. and i don't think of that as "cheating".

[ivoree]

Hough says Horowitz cheats in Tchaikovsky 1. I can't hear it ...
https://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/stephen_hough/blog/2009/04/01/why_the_chopin_b_minor_sonata_is_harder_than_the_liszt_b_minor_sonata

[perfect_pitch]

Or David Helfgott (remember him?) - for example, in his recording of 'Rach 3'.

OK FIRST OF ALL... I've seen and heard David Helfgott perform the Rach 3 TWICE... It may not be the best recording of all time, but the guy sure works his arse off (as best as he mentally can) and can play it pretty damn well...

SECOND OF ALL... WE CANNOT and I repeat CANNOT compare David Helfgott to Richard Kastle....

David Helfgott was an excellent pianist in his younger days and is still capable...
Richard Kastle is just a wanker.

[giannalinda]

Ive heard that someone did a performance but right before the show, the piano keys like broke or they wentout of tune...so they put on a recording of him playing and he faked it. not sure who did it...

[iroveashe]

Ive heard that someone did a performance but right before the show, the piano keys like broke or they wentout of tune...so they put on a recording of him playing and he faked it. not sure who did it...

That sounds more like a Bugs Bunny episode 

[communist]

OK FIRST OF ALL... I've seen and heard David Helfgott perform the Rach 3 TWICE... It may not be the best recording of all time, but the guy sure works his arse off (as best as he mentally can) and can play it pretty damn well...

SECOND OF ALL... WE CANNOT and I repeat CANNOT compare David Helfgott to Richard Kastle....

David Helfgott was an excellent pianist in his younger days and is still capable...
Richard Kastle is just a wanker.

He probably bases his life around that one ridiculous theory 

[perfect_pitch]

Excuse me Communist??? That BETTER NOT have been directed at me!   

Well considering Kastle seems to have based his life upon de-crediting famous pianists and claiming that they cheated while playing certain pieces, when people like Horowitz, Cziffra... didn't cheat, and had the technical skill to play impressively well. Kastle is a fraud who's so-called claim to fame is that he can play the last minute of a piece of music better than anyone... that doesn't make them a pianist... In fact, when you base your entire career on being able to play a minute of music better than anyone, it makes you a loser.

David Helfgott WAS a very fine player, until he had his psychotic breakdown. The man however can still play fairly well despite the difficulties he has... but thats not his fault.

[communist]

Excuse me Communist??? That BETTER NOT have been directed at me!   

Well considering Kastle seems to have based his life upon de-crediting famous pianists and claiming that they cheated while playing certain pieces, when people like Horowitz, Cziffra... didn't cheat, and had the technical skill to play impressively well. Kastle is a fraud who's so-called claim to fame is that he can play the last minute of a piece of music better than anyone... that doesn't make them a pianist... In fact, when you base your entire career on being able to play a minute of music better than anyone, it makes you a loser.

David Helfgott WAS a very fine player, until he had his psychotic breakdown. The man however can still play fairly well despite the difficulties he has... but thats not his fault.

I meant "Richard Kastle probably bases his entire life around that ridiculous theory". Sorry you misunderstood 

[perfect_pitch]

No problem... my fault for jumping to conclusions.

[muscleman]

I studied one summer with Hungarian pianist Bela Nagy who worked closely with Bartok.  I had began work on the Bartok Suite for Piano.  The first movement has a lot of 'hands on top of each other" throughout.  Nagy had me rework the fingering so that the hands were separate and not on top of each other.  After I returned to school in the Fall, my instructor had me return to the way Bartok had written it.  He, too, had studied with Nagy, but thought it ridiculous to change it.  The way Bartok wrote it worked much better for me as I had difficulty with the voicing from the refingering.  After finding a bio of Nagy written by a student of many years, it appears that he cheated quite often by shifting left hand notes to the right hand and vice-versa.  He recommended his students split a difficult passage between two hands arguing that if it sounds the same, and it is easier to play, why not try it?  Interesting, but for this work, it didn't work for me.

[omar_roy]

Well, there is a sense of logic to the statement, but we must also realize that showmanship does play a part in performance and that may be one example of it, even if overlapping the hands did make it easier for you to play (and if that's the case, then why not?! ).

For example, Liszt's etude "Un Sospiro" can just as well be played without the crossing of hands.  And though it is an "etude" that has a large focus on the crossing of hands, it is also about the showmanship of the crossing of hands.

[nearenough]

My piano teacher, Leon Tumarkin, while I was in college, demonstrated perfect pitch (I could play a random chord of 8-10 notes and he could name each note one by one) told me that Horowitz (still supreme, nevertheless) dropped [many, several] notes in his performances of the Rach 3.

He taught me some tricks in note distribution, notably as I recall right now, in the Chopin Etude #4 Op 10, second page, bottom line, starting with b-d left; f# b right and up, take the bottom 3 notes with the left hand leaving only one note sequences for the right. Much easier, and you play all the notes.

[artsyalchemist]

LISZT'S FAKING LIST OF 20th CENTURY RECORDING ARTISTS
Descending octaves faking club
BRENDEL faking hands together +mess up 10:12
BULVA faking hands together +mess up 9:07
PADEREWSKI faking hands together +mess up 8:21
CORTOT faking hands together +mess up 9:07
HAMBOURG faking hands together, leaving out octaves, slows down +mess up 7:34
DICHTER faking hands together 8:43
CAMPANELLA faking hands together 9:26
PIZARRO faking hands together 4:49
PENNARIO -plays in slow motion 9:37
RACHMANINOFF makes it easier by not hammering and playing quietly. His ending is boring, simplified and has wrong notes 10:17 it's history.

I saw that on Richard Kastle's page..perhaps we should ask him about this topic.

[artsyalchemist]

Oops, I just realized that this was already covered. 

[perfect_pitch]

I saw that on Richard Kastle's page..perhaps we should ask him about this topic.

Erm - nah - I say we leave the little sh*t alone... I can't be arsed arguing with an idiot... and I'm sure he is one.

[vansh]

Sorry about the necro to this thread, but I came across this thread and thought it's relevant to what I've been going through.

Since I'm learning Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody 2, I've been listening to various pianists play it. Fortunately many pianists have their own take on this piece, so I have a lot to choose from. But it turns out that many will goof or cheat or whatever through one of the passages in this piece. Yes, apparently the last page garnered some controversy in the past so I'm late to that one, but that's not the one I have in mind. Suffice it to say that many do butcher the last page but there's more than do it successfully (in my opinion) than is given credit for.

Anyway, the passage that I'm talking about is the scales. Liszt wrote it as three octaves, playing one octave per beat, two runs in A then two runs in F#, with the right hand. The vast majority however will do something different, or butcher it entirely.

For example, Brendel skips the first 4 notes for the A runs, then does arpeggios for the F# runs; Cortot uses glissandi for the A runs and arpeggios for the F# runs; Gyorgy mashes the last octave in his runs; Lang Lang skips notes throughout; Jung Lin only plays 2 octaves instead of the written 3; Lisitsa only plays a bit more than one octave and then arpeggios the rest; Morozova basically 1-notes the last octave; Mrvica cuts quite a few notes out of the last octave; Ott plays a bit more than one octave before jumping the rest.

There are some that do play it "correctly", i.e. as written, however. Hamelin goes through all 22 notes in 1 second flat. Tsujii and Marzocchi are in the 1.1-1.2 second range, but gets all the notes in there. Same with Paderewski, although he does it at a more leisurely pace of about 1.4 seconds (maybe he slowed down in his old age?). I'm sure there are others, but I'm still looking through different performances.

As I was listening through different interpretations, this was one section that stuck out for me. To me, the highlight of this section is showing off how fast the pianist can play different scales (a basic, fundamental piano skill), yet many pianists will play this section very fast, and not able to play the scales as fast as the rest of the section so they end up cheating (or at least altering) their way through it. Some performers like Ott even emphasize the left hand or become more animated during this section, I suspect because they know they're flubbing their way through the right hand so looking to deflect attention away from that. And I noticed part of this thread has focused on one individual; suffice it to say that in his publicly available excerpt of this piece, the self-styled master of the ending omits this section, so I guess draw your own conclusions.

It seemed somewhat contradictory to me that for a section that's meant to show off technique (i.e. how quickly you can play the scales), most pianists choose instead to play too fast, and then flub or cheat their way through. Despite another thread where the recommendation is overwhelmingly to play slower and accurately instead of fast and sloppy, it seems like many performers will instead go for the latter route, at least for this section. For those that may say "well being musical is what matters, not technique", I don't think Paderewski's version was any less musical despite doing the three octaves in 1.4 seconds, yet most performers will play the section as if they can do it in a second and then take shortcuts to get through the scales; they've obviously opted for what they consider to be more "musical". I guess I'm somewhat more disillusioned with professional pianists now after noticing this.

As a side note, not only does Hamelin have the fastest scale I've seen so far, but he also uses a unique (to me) fingering: For the F# scales, he uses his 5th finger to play the F, and then his thumb to play the F#. This works out because he only needs to use the slow finger once per octave anyway (so it has plenty of time to "reset"), and it seems like he gets a lot of rotation so that this puts his thumb in the right place for the F#.

[louispodesta]

My understanding of musicians, practically all of them, and of all genre of music, is that the performance you hear on the CD is always faster than what they actually play in the studio. Makes them look more virtuosos. As to leaving out notes, I think that’s a no brainer, of course they do. 

When it is a piece for piano and orchestra, the piano often comes out flat.  It is a physics thing, that digital recording has gotten rid of.

So, most of the analog recordings are juiced to make them sound in tune.   An easy well to tell is to listen to the strings, and if it sounds way too fast, then it is juiced.  Also, and this is my favorite, practically every recording of the Schumann Concerto is juiced.

The way to tell is to wait for the oboe to double the piano in measure #398 in the 3rd movement.  If it sounds like someone trying to pull a chickens guts out through its throat, then it is juiced.  Because of the nature of the oboe, you can't speed it up on an analog recording.

If you don't believe me, go and listen to old man Kempf's live filmed recording of the piece, and the first thing that you will notice is that you have never heard a studio recording that even remotely sounded like that.
 

[nyiregyhazi]

When it is a piece for piano and orchestra, the piano often comes out flat.  It is a physics thing, that digital recording has gotten rid of.

So, most of the analog recordings are juiced to make them sound in tune.   An easy well to tell is to listen to the strings, and if it sounds way too fast, then it is juiced.  Also, and this is my favorite, practically every recording of the Schumann Concerto is juiced.

The way to tell is to wait for the oboe to double the piano in measure #398 in the 3rd movement.  If it sounds like someone trying to pull a chickens guts out through its throat, then it is juiced.  Because of the nature of the oboe, you can't speed it up on an analog recording.

If you don't believe me, go and listen to old man Kempf's live filmed recording of the piece, and the first thing that you will notice is that you have never heard a studio recording that even remotely sounded like that.
 

Oh dear. Can you ever post without including some ludicrous unevidenced conspiracy theory? What exactly is this "physics thing" that makes analog recordings come out flat, please? Specifically why does hiring an orchestra cause it?

[awesom_o]

My brother plays in a very famous orchestra. They record and tour frequently with well-known international stars. Everything is most certainly not 'juiced', whatever that means.


You talk about this 'juice' as though the Schumann concerto were an Olympic Swimming event.

[louispodesta]

Oh dear. Can you ever post without including some ludicrous unevidenced conspiracy theory? What exactly is this "physics thing" that makes analog recordings come out flat, please? Specifically why does hiring an orchestra cause it?

I discussed this with a recording engineer, and including the orchestra, he said one of the major difficulties was that it always tended to come out flat.  Eugene Ormandy tuned his orchestra at 444 to compensate for it, and to also give it a brighter sound.

All I know is that my ear tells me that in most concerto recordings the strings sound rushed and the oboes aren't anywhere close to pitch.   They are way sharp.

[perfect_pitch]

Can't we just let this charming little thread of necrophilia die already??? We had fun arguing over the subject 4 years ago, and now this thread was supposed to die a horrible, horrible death... like syphilis.

[j_menz]

The physics argument sounds pretty spurious, but I'm no expert. I'd like to see some reference, though.

And preferably not a direct quote from Eugene Ormandy, who, as this page will attest, was not always clear in what he said.  

Can't we just let this charming little thread of necrophilia die already???

Apparently not.

[nyiregyhazi]

I discussed this with a recording engineer, and including the orchestra, he said one of the major difficulties was that it always tended to come out flat.  Eugene Ormandy tuned his orchestra at 444 to compensate for it, and to also give it a brighter sound.

All I know is that my ear tells me that in most concerto recordings the strings sound rushed and the oboes aren't anywhere close to pitch.   They are way sharp.

Even if I trusted your ears, you have not even succeeded in being consistent within your two points, nevermind created a persuasive overall argument. Sometimes you seem to be implying that the piano alone goes flat and hence the oboe is sharper? Aside from requiring far better evidence than a vague allusion to something you vaguely recollect an engineer saying (clearly without enough personal  knowledge to recount or interpret it reliably) your point about tuning the orchestra up would contradict the idea that it's specifically the piano and not the rest of the orchestra. To support your delusion, he'd have needed to be tuning flat, not sharp. You're trying to run two self - contradictory lines of argument side by side. Make your mind up which one you believe and stick with it. Running contradictory arguments doesn't improve the odds that one line might stick. It shows weakness of personal conviction and inability to apply suitable  scrutiny to your thought processes before coming to conclusions. Above all it shows that you started with an assumption and then looked to come up with the evidence afterwards.  You didn't come to it by any logic or evidence based reasoning.

If the oboe alone is sharp, it's because it's out of tune with the piano. No acoustic recording distorts the relationship between pitches of different instruments. They either speed up and sharpen or slow down and flatten. If you have any evidence that this standard belief is wrong then you'll have to do better than this bilge about you having special hearing. And if Ormandy was compensating by going sharp, it suggests that the final play back would have gone SLOWER- not faster. Any speeding up would be to restore the correct tempo and pitch from a slowing and flattening (which would affect both oboe and piano). Otherwise to speed it up would make everything sharp. There's no logical coherence to any of this drivel that you're coming out with. In the olden days, performance traditions really were quicker. Claiming magic ears is not going to persuade anyone of your bizarre delusions.

[sislermi]

Paolo Gallico (The Schirmer Edition) of La Campanella by Franz Liszt in my opinion DOES NOT COUNT if you play it like Gallico instructs.  He puts the lamest metronome marking (eight note = 176) which is WAYY too slow in my opinion for this "fire-like" exciting piece.  The best interpretations of this piece (in my opinion) would be about 1.5x that speed.  Approximately quarter note = 132.  THAT is a true performance of La Campanella.  Remember Liszt was such a virtuoso, so the worst way to interpret it would be to slow it down. 
Same with Hungarian Rhapsody #6, there are so many performers that are very good, BUT they don't speed up into a legitimate presto bpm range for the ending.  Which would be okay if they slowed down the allegro octave section before it (that way you can actually hear a significant change of speed when it gets to presto).  Two of my favorite performances of this piece are Horowitz and Martha Argerich.  Horowitz actually slows down the allegro part so that the listener can actually hear a change of speed when it gets to presto.  And Martha accelerates DURING the presto to a speed which I would consider legitimate (in regards to a presto bpm).  Cziffra however, does a good job playing the notes loudly and clearly but when he gets to presto there is barely any audible speed change....he should have either slowed down the allegro OR worked on the presto a bit more.
Just my two cents.

[neilmix]

I've heard rumor of a legendary cheat of Artur Rubinstein -- I think it was the high F in Chopin b-flat minor scherzo -- he would supposedly have the nearby notes tuned to the same pitch!

Most egregious cheat is Andre Watts using his right hand to play Paganini Etude No. 1.

[coda_colossale]

Prokofiev, 3rd piano concerto, finale, double note scales, every single pianist cheats. I still don't know how to play it actually as double notes.

[thesixthsensemusic]

Paolo Gallico (The Schirmer Edition) of La Campanella by Franz Liszt in my opinion DOES NOT COUNT if you play it like Gallico instructs.  He puts the lamest metronome marking (eight note = 176) which is WAYY too slow in my opinion for this "fire-like" exciting piece.  The best interpretations of this piece (in my opinion) would be about 1.5x that speed.  Approximately quarter note = 132.  THAT is a true performance of La Campanella.  Remember Liszt was such a virtuoso, so the worst way to interpret it would be to slow it down. 
Same with Hungarian Rhapsody #6, there are so many performers that are very good, BUT they don't speed up into a legitimate presto bpm range for the ending.  Which would be okay if they slowed down the allegro octave section before it (that way you can actually hear a significant change of speed when it gets to presto).  Two of my favorite performances of this piece are Horowitz and Martha Argerich.  Horowitz actually slows down the allegro part so that the listener can actually hear a change of speed when it gets to presto.  And Martha accelerates DURING the presto to a speed which I would consider legitimate (in regards to a presto bpm).  Cziffra however, does a good job playing the notes loudly and clearly but when he gets to presto there is barely any audible speed change....he should have either slowed down the allegro OR worked on the presto a bit more.
Just my two cents.

The issue with this is in fact the complete opposite. Liszt himself would have played it much closer in tempo to what Gallico would have instructed us in his editions. We know the following things about tempi in his playing, from his own diaries and from other reliable sources, such as eyewitnesses:
- he played the Hammerklavier Sonata in an hour
- He sight-read through Grieg's Concerto
- his own performance of the Moonlight Sonata was EXTREMELY liberal in terms of tempi chosen
- He intended his Beethoven transcriptions to be sight-readable by an average Conservatoire student while leaving them musically functional
- his famous students Eugene d'Albert and Francis Planté did record works, often surprisingly slow-paced (with d'Albert taking 1.5 times as long to play Saint-Saëns' Etude en forme d'une Valse, as Cortot did, for example)

That indicates that he chose way more easy-going tempi than what's usual now, while keeping in mind that he also preferred freedom of own interpretation over doing exactly as written.

Various factors have led to modern tempo choices being different:
- rushing tempi used to fit pieces on a 78rpm record without cuts, which are copied by people using them for inspiration
- increasing role of media exposure for pianists, which rewards virtuoso extravaganza for the sake of it, something Liszt was strongly opposed to (like when he berated an auditioning student for his brainless display of rapid octave jumps just for trying to sound impressive).

It is very hard to be certain about this, but it's well possible that it's today's playing tradition that is flawed, not the tempi Gallico asks for.

[awesom_o]

The issue with this is in fact the complete opposite. Liszt himself would have played it much closer in tempo to what Gallico would have instructed us in his editions. We know the following things about tempi in his playing, from his own diaries and from other reliable sources, such as eyewitnesses:
- he played the Hammerklavier Sonata in an hour
- He sight-read through Grieg's Concerto
- his own performance of the Moonlight Sonata was EXTREMELY liberal in terms of tempi chosen
- He intended his Beethoven transcriptions to be sight-readable by an average Conservatoire student while leaving them musically functional
- his famous students Eugene d'Albert and Francis Planté did record works, often surprisingly slow-paced (with d'Albert taking 1.5 times as long to play Saint-Saëns' Etude en forme d'une Valse, as Cortot did, for example)

That indicates that he chose way more easy-going tempi than what's usual now, while keeping in mind that he also preferred freedom of own interpretation over doing exactly as written.

Various factors have led to modern tempo choices being different:
- rushing tempi used to fit pieces on a 78rpm record without cuts, which are copied by people using them for inspiration
- increasing role of media exposure for pianists, which rewards virtuoso extravaganza for the sake of it, something Liszt was strongly opposed to (like when he berated an auditioning student for his brainless display of rapid octave jumps just for trying to sound impressive).

It is very hard to be certain about this, but it's well possible that it's today's playing tradition that is flawed, not the tempi Gallico asks for.

This was a worthy post.... 100% on the money.

[black_keys]

Hamelin cheats in HR2 he play a G# octave in the base at 6:20 , when the original is a single G# note , and at the ending he add some octaves

[j_menz]

Hamelin cheats in HR2 he play a G# octave in the base at 6:20 , when the original is a single G# note , and at the ending he add some octaves

Is that a cheat or an embellishment?

[black_keys]

Idk 

[apollon1717]

I remember watching in ashtonishment when my teacher kept using his left hand to execute some of the right hand jumps in La Campanella.

"You can't do that" says I , that is cheating.

"Is not the idea to make everything as easy as possible" says he.

I won't tell you what he did with Chopin 10/1.

Thal

What he did in op.10/1 is not so difficult to find out...the famous A major arpeggio in bar35 and 36 could/should be be done 1-3-5-2...2 crossing over the 3thd on A...descending 3-2-1-2-4-2-1-2-4-2-1-2 etc.can be done without breaking the legato..
and there is of course a fantastic alternative for bars 25-42..
but I sure you know that?...dont you?..

oh!almost forgot..bar 8 D# on last beat should be taken with left hand including a tiny ritenuto..
Just an example...
Want to know more?..write me privately...I give you some amazing fingering for Scarbo..and all the other Ravel pieces if desired..
makes it a lot more easier...

Sincerely

Kaleodoscope's long time student..

[theholygideons]

What he did in op.10/1 is not so difficult to find out...the famous A major arpeggio in bar35 and 36 could/should be be done 1-3-5-2...2 crossing over the 3thd on A...descending 3-2-1-2-4-2-1-2-4-2-1-2 etc.can be done without breaking the legato..
and there is of course a fantastic alternative for bars 25-42..
but I sure you know that?...dont you?..

if think it's easier just to play any awkward arpeggios with both hands quickly alternating instead of using just right hand.   

[j_menz]

[apollon1717]

if think it's easier just to play any awkward arpeggios with both hands quickly alternating instead of using just right hand.   

Oh sorry...I was in the believe I was talking to a professional...

[apollon1717]

Once in recital I heard Claudio Arrau leave out the fugue in the Liszt Sonata. Tragic.

Could you please back up your claim?
Where and when was this recital?
What did he play instead of the fugue and/or where exactly did he pick up.?
Please answer in chronological order.Asap!
Thanks.

[theholygideons]

Oh sorry...I was in the believe I was talking to a professional...

In fact i would go as far as to say that you should play all of op.10 no.1 arpeggios with both hands instead of just your right hand. And that you should play op.10 no.2 by playing the chromatic notes with the right hand and chords with the left, while getting your partner to play the accompaniment.

[apollon1717]

In fact i would go as far as to say that you should play all of op.10 no.1 arpeggios with both hands instead of just your right hand. And that you should play op.10 no.2 by playing the chromatic notes with the right hand and chords with the left, while getting your partner to play the accompaniment.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them...on top of that I must say God has been extra cruel to you..He denied you  the faculty of  thinking but endowed you with the gift of writing...LMAO!

[theholygideons]

no, but i'm not kidding, i have seen people use 2 hands for op.10 no.1, especially during the a major chord and the few bars preceeding it. 

[apollon1717]

Sharp as a sach full of wet mice...

[theholygideons]

lol, i don't get it, what's so funny. 
was there part of the conversation i missed or something?

[bulldozer2012]

I remember Carlo Grante playing the Godowsky study in thirds (No. 36) and doing some of the thirds with his right hand, which I thought defeated the purpose of the study. I wouldn't be able to play it in a million years, so perhaps I shouldn't judge.

[j_menz]

no, but i'm not kidding, i have seen people use 2 hands for op.10 no.1, especially during the a major chord and the few bars preceeding it. 

I don't for a minute doubt that some people have been silly enough to do this, but it entirely defeats the purpose of the etude.

[theholygideons]

I don't for a minute doubt that some people have been silly enough to do this, but it entirely defeats the purpose of the etude.

Yes, but for some people the broken A major chord, or the C-Eb-A-Eb may be too wide a stretch, and any alternative fingering would make them slow down without any musical justification. For some, it is anatomically impossible, and if it were the same with me, i would be inclined to just cheat that chord, instead of risk damaging my hands or not playing the whole thing altogether. 

[j_menz]

Yes, but for some people the broken A major chord, or the C-Eb-A-Eb may be too wide a stretch, and any alternative fingering would make them slow down without any musical justification. For some, it is anatomically impossible, and if it were the same with me, i would be inclined to just cheat that chord, instead of risk damaging my hands or not playing the whole thing altogether. 

The point of the etude is that there is no stretch. If you are stretching anywhere, you are doing it wrong.

[theholygideons]

The point of the etude is that there is no stretch. If you are stretching anywhere, you are doing it wrong.

no you are ignorant.

[j_menz]

no you are ignorant.

Feel free to believe that if you will. And carry on using two hands and gaining nothing.

[theholygideons]

Feel free to believe that if you will. And carry on using two hands and gaining nothing.

and you can continue living in the stone age.