[tunesmith]

One of my favorite piano practice tricks was using one hand to teach the other. Not like how this book describes it, but using inverted patterns.

In the first movement of Apposionata Op. 57, there's a pattern that goes from hand to hand, in groups of five. Difficult for the left hand. So my teacher had me learn it in the right hand too, but inverted.

So in the left hand it went Db Eb G Eb Db. In the right hand that would be Eb Db A Db Eb, an octave up. Mirror image. You'd play both at the same time.

It sounded awful (and then kind of cool after a while) but it worked really well.

[revolvingocelot]

Ah Apposionata! Crazy dynamics, passing one's hands over one another, a great showpiece. For those that don't play piano, the parent is essentially bragging, and is entirely justified in doing so. I feel compelled to upvote because the implication that it was successfully learned

My favourite performance of it (not Lang Lang!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEptNFzLpjk

[tunesmith]

I plead humility, I never learned the third movement all the way. :)

EDIT: A couple notes about the above performance, for those interested:

First, the section I was describing above is at 3:09.

Second, and purely trivial - she has a mistake that is extremely common among pianists. Everyone copies each other and they miss details. At the top of the figure that starts at 7:53, measure 219, there's an 8th rest, not a 16th rest before the last three notes. Same with the following patterns. Both the Dover and Schnabel editions clearly show these eighth rests, but no one plays them.

I suppose it's possible that Dover and Schnabel are both wrong and there's some autograph edition out there somewhere that has the 16th rest, but accidentally changing it to an 8th rest (and adjusting the following note values) in multiple places would be a really weird mistake to make in printing.

[rossjudson]

This was insanely good. Thanks! She is remarkable.