For the better part of the last decade I’ve been doing the Brahms 51 Exercises as technical warmups, and I have hated them. They’re tedious and demanding, but I do have to admit that they do wonders for my dexterity.
Recently I had the rebellious idea to try doing something different (gasp!) as part of my warmups, so I put a call out on Twitter to see what other professional pianists were up to.
David Jalbert—whose album of John Adams and Philip Glass I was once obsessed with—gave me the suggestion of running through the first pages of Chopin etudes, which is frankly a brilliant idea. Each etude in its entirety is a whole piece in its own right that demands actual practicing, but the first pages are generally musically consistent and just technically demanding enough to be challenging but not impossible warmups.
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