brahms exercises

[Tash]

i read a book once, i can't remember what it was, that suggested playing brahms's 53 exercises...it is 53 isn't it, or something like that...
just wondering what others thought of them? cos i'm sick to death of hanon cos it's done bugger all for my technique...

[Barbosa-piano]

 Those exercises are pretty good actually, but they do not seem very popular around here... I believe that one of them is Chopin's Etude Op. 25 No. 2, arranged in thirds... They are very good in my opinion. There are very good recordings of these exercises by Edil Biret...

[BoliverAllmon]

51 exercises

[Ludwig]

some of them are very challenging, nasty :p, i like to use them for slow sight-reading sometimes too

[thalbergmad]

I used to play a couple of them.

The Weber Rondo is a nice left hand loosener.

My favourite is the Bach-Chaconne for the left hand only. This was used in the Horror Film, The Beast with 5 fingers that scared the hell out of me as a boy.

[_tyro]

They are useful, but can be really hard on your hands, if you don't have the reach.  Some of the early ones are primarily rhythmic (3 vs. 4, etc) and they are fine.  I pretty much destroyed my computer-abused thumb on one of the later ones (46, I think). 

BTW, the Bach Chaconne,  and several other transcriptions are separate from the "51 studies".

[janice]

This is interesting that I ran into this thread because today I was at the music store and happened to see the Brahms Technical Studies book, not realizing that Brahms even wrote a book like that.  I browsed thru it and wanted to buy it, but realized I left my checkbook at home.  I'll have to go back and get it.