thanks Kj and Dan, these days, I use op10-10 as an warm up exercise or so called hand massage exercise
. When time is right I probably will speed up a little. Every input from PS is a plus to me.
At the moment I am also working on some Schuman and liszt works to keep out by bordron.
Firstly, it's definitely a big improvement and there's much more sense of a line- with far fewer of the "holes" in the sound. However, I do feel that you still need to make major overhauls, in order to make your work on it truly useful to your technical development. I'm not sure if it's a good warm-up, because your hand is still having to do a lot of stiffening again collapse (especially the right hand 5th finger)- rather than moving freely. There's a risk that you're going to be more inclined to cause certain muscles to tighten- rather than loosen them up. I know the feeling well- as I used to have a very similar habit with my right hand 5- where the only muscular activations were based on trying to solidify it to transfer arm pressure. I had huge problems when it came to actually having to move it- that I've improved upon but still have enormous amounts of work to do on.
I have a few thoughts that I hope would be useful. There's a chapter in Alan Fraser's new book (All thumbs) where he mentions a lesson he taught me a couple of years back. He speaks about how although my hand was activating, it was only doing so to save itself from collapsing into a cluster under arm pressure- not to create genuine movement of the fingers through the keys. While I can see how it would be easy for people to say- "well you would say that", I think this describes perfectly what is happening here. The way you use the arm is to bear down through the hand- which then has to brace itself to transfer that pressure. You are moving more than before- but there's still a sense that the hand is acting under duress, beneath the surface. It's responding to pressures, rather than instigating movement from an easy position. Imagine the difference between if you know someone is going to push you and you try to clench your body into staying stable- compared to if you simply move to push them before they can push you. The latter is freer and substantially less effort- yet it achieves so much more. In piano playing, it's less effort if the finger starts moving first- than if the arm presses and the finger has to try to immobilise itself against an oncoming force.
I think you need to do a lot of work on how you conceive the arm motions. At the moment, they are geared towards generating pressure though the hand- which the hand then has to fixate to transfer. Also, you often tend to get stuck behind the individual finger (after this downward pressure), before instigating an extra movement to get to the next one. It ALMOST flows, but there's a sense of slightly stopping for each finger, rather than continously drifting in a fluid path. This makes the movements a lot more complex. It's very hard to flow if there are downward pressures through separate notes, than if the fingers are creating the downward movement- while the arm keeps flowing over the top of them.
I think you need to find a way of moving the arm, not to generate pressure through the fingers, but to actively AVOID pressing through the hand (especially with the right hand 5th finger). It's a complete reversal of the conception of what the arm is for. Picture the arm drifting from side to side (often in circles for the left hand) to help take the fingers to their keys- but don't bear down through them! Use it as a
reminder to the finger to
move its key- but keep the arm drifting towards the next finger while that finger moves. Don't stop for the finger! At first, you'll find that many fingers are simply not generating enough movement to create tone without the arm pressing (especially the right hand 5th). You need to work on going very slow (so there's time to be sure that the finger moves out enough to get right through the key)- but never stopping the flow of the arm movement while this happens. I'd work on something like the left hand of the D flat nocturne, in order to acquire this style of motion in something slower and less challenging, before trying to apply it to this study. It's just too complex to achieve fine control, until the arm movements are truly light and ongoing, rather than based on digging through fingers.
Also, with the R.H. I'd practise very slow without the 2nd finger note (ie. just broken octaves from 1 to 5). Lift the fifth finger first (keeping the thumb down) and then let it slowly descend until it's touching the key- but don't let the knuckle droop down. From here, work on reaching out through the key, while the arm slightly drifts up and out (to prevent any downward arm pressure). With this approach, the finger will have no choice but to start creating genuine movement- which will slowly begin to loosen the tightness that will inevitably be building up from your arm pressures. Over time it will become more and more easy to genuinely move through the keys with the finger, even when the 2nd is brought back into it.