Chopin Op. 25 no. 1

[christiaan]

What technique does this study cover?

[Nightscape]

Stretches in the left hand and some in the right hand, balance of texture (melody and accompaniment), bringing out a melody with the right hand 5th finger, some arpeggio work.

[tradge]

Stretches in the left hand and some in the right hand, balance of texture (melody and accompaniment), bringing out a melody with the right hand 5th finger, some arpeggio work.

Yeah, it's a pretty difficult study when you're just starting at it lol

[franzliszt2]

It's about lateral freedom

[dnephi]

It's about lateral freedom

Something you need a lot in Beethoven, strangely.

[kd]

Something you need a lot in Beethoven, strangely.

You do need it of course, but why strangely? It is usually clear in the score - typically you have fast arpeggios going up and down in the range of an octave or a tenth and lateral freedom is exactly the thing you need to avoid stretching tension. Just look at, among others, Op. 2 No. 1 the 4th movement (LH arpeggios and all), Op. 7 the first (the 16th run) and even more - the 3rd movement (Trio), Op. 31 No. 3 the 4th movement, and - most evidently - the 3rd movement of Waldstein (the passage right before the Prestissimo part), where similarity to the Chopin etude is striking!

In Beethoven it is sometimes actually far less pianisting than in Chopin. Thus this etude gives you a good start.

[elevateme_returns]

franz is right, its all about pivoting and making circles with your arms.

may i recommend the 2nd godowsky version of this, "like 4 hands". amazing

[dnephi]

What I mean is that Beethoven isn't one I'd expect to ask for leaps.  He often does in his Czerny-like figurations.  See for example, the Op. 53 third movement has many leaps which need to sound even with the rest of the passagework.

[kd]

Yes there are very nasty leaps in Beethoven, sure. For example in Op. 2 No. 3 first movement there are 2 or 3 places where you have to move your LH quickly 2 or 3 octaves down to play a full chord fortissimo. I missed it once in a small concert and I'm sure everyone noticed that (though there were more mistakes of course). An irritating thing that does stick out horribly.

But I'm not sure if the Chopin Op. 25 No. 1 is primarily about leaps. There are some leaps of course, especially the famous F in the right hand near the end, but that's just a small addition, as the main goal of the etude is lateral movement rather than leaps.

[dnephi]

Aren't leaps a subset of lateral movements?

[kd]

Well, they certainly have nonempty intersection, but I'd say none is contained in the other. With leaps, the problem is also about accuracy, not just tension. If your arm movement doesn't come form the arm itself but from the hand, you're very likely to play wrong notes (apart from getting tired of course). You just have to make quick arm movements. Not the same muscles are dangerously stretched when, say, you play C-G-C-E-C-G-... without proper arm movement (this results not in wrong notes, but in uneven playing). In this case you have to combine smaller arm movements with good fingerwork to get tensionfree playing. It is similar to a leap in many respects, but not identical.

[cloches_de_geneve]

Leaps, yes. Lateral freedom, of course. But once these aspects are mastered, this is ultimately an etude in balance, delicacy of touch, nuancing of color and shading, finding a middle ground between overexpressiveness and underexpressiveness. A quite difficult etude if you think about it in these terms.