Piano Forum

I'm clearly less qualified than Ted to speak on the matter, but I thought I'd still share my observations. I worked on the Revolutionary Etude and went through about half of it at a relatively slow tempo and then kept it aside. However, it never caused me issues.

It's been my experience that the 'right' technique is nearly always effortless. There's a certain way in which I've found we tend to push tempo, which feels like "tripping over oneself". It's like you're walking very fast and it's making you unstable. I've found that it's not helpful in most cases to do that. You need to try and figure out a way to ground yourself (forgive me for the abstract metaphors). For speed, it makes sense that you want as little muscular effort as possible because the big muscle groups are slow. You want to be floating over the keys in some sense. It's been my experience that the wrist often needs to be a bit higher while playing fast. For that, it might be a good idea to start with a high wrist and then bring it down to an appropriate level. As far as I can tell, the forearm usually gets stressed when the wrist is lower rather than higher. You can have good posture, but psychological tension can still make you tense up -- which is something you want to avoid.

One thing which I've found useful is to simply imagine the notes you want to produce at the right tempo in your head for a while, and then try and reproduce it.