Chopin Opus 25 no 10, octave etude

[chris2014]

Hi guys, I have a few questions regarding this etude;

During the practice of the piece, I have started to notice tension in my forearms, due to the constant need to hold my hand stretched to reach the octaves, notably within the left arm in measures 11-13.

This tension is also evident within measure within measures 17-18 where the 2nd and 3rd fingers are holding down the F and G, while the outside of the hand is playing octaves, causing my pinkie to tend to miss the Bb in the phrase, and my right hand's pinkie missing the D natural.

and also within the final four measures of the first section, due to the octave jumps.

Regarding this, are there any techniques that I could practice in the early stages of mastering this piece to stop further build up of tension and thus causing any further damage that could occur, as well as any other advice such as, placement of the hand to ensure accuracy would be also welcome!

Thank you!
- Chris

[jeffkonkol]

I'm not sure there is any magical technique to this other than just figuring out how to get your fingers to be soft when moving through the chords.  Given that you are talking about holding the inner notes, I'm going to assume that you are using the noted fingers or close to, which is wonderful - I know some advocate the held notes as more of a dynamic mark rather than a held duration, operating on the assumption that pedal is going to carry it - but it's an etude - kind of defeats the purpose in my eyes at least.

I practiced this slowly with no pedal other than what was marked, stressing the legato octaves as an exercise of slowly working out the tension.   Do note that in measures 11 and 12 that the inner held notes are only held for a beat as opposed to the half note duration that is more common... that provides a nice tension clear on the other three notes of the phrase.

as for measure 17 ... if you find a way to do that comfortably, please bottle it and sell it for the rest of us.

on the last couple of measures before moving to the softer section - what I played with was cutting the phrase up until I found a comfortable way to move my hands through .. .it jumps around quite a bit ... its been awhile but I remember going through and sorting it... figuring out that in some places mentally dividing a group of 6 into 4+2 rather than 3+3 for instance really ended up helping .... might pick this one back up - if so ill be more specific.