KevinM I am making slow progress with this piece, mostly as I am struggling to get it up to speed.
This sounds great, Kevin! Regarding tempo, I think your tempo sounds fine but if you want to speed up ā¦ Iām wondering if the tricks for increasing the tempo are different for Bach because of the connections/interplay across handsā¦ thatās not the way I want to say it, but itās all I can come up with at the momentā¦. But letās assume theyāre not, and Iāll give you a suggestion that I got from my teacher.
So Iām looking at the score and Iāve not played this before, so Iām not sure if this will work, but I wonder if you could try something like the following:
Play HS and figure out a slightly faster tempo to aim for initially. Make sure your fingering works for that tempo. Then, instead of going back and forth between HS and HT practice, do something where youāre playing the full RH part but only certain beats in the LH, and then switch to playing the full LH part but only certain beats in the RH. When you do this, you have to make sure youāre using the same fingering as you would if you were playing all the notes. Also, which beats you play needs to be consistent, not random. IOW, say you only play beats one and three in the LH and you do that across four measures. Then you switch to only beats two and four in LH, etc. So itās systematic.
Initially you probably want to drop beats in the measures where the hand only plays eighth notes instead of 16th notes, but you will also want to do it where you play the full set of notes when itās eighth notes and youāre dropping from those sets of sixteenth notes (say, just play the first note in the set, or the third note in the set of four). Does that makes sense?
My teacher has me do things like this sometimes, she always prefaces it by saying āthis will do your head inā or āok, Iām going to ask you do something thatās really mean.ā š Depending on the music, itās crazy hard, and youāll have to actually play much more slowly initially, which might seem counter intuitive because the goal is increasing the tempo.
You donāt need to do it for long, just a few repetitions. Then go back to HT, play through it below your initial goal tempo, and then try speeding up again.
Anyway, if youāre interested, try this method and see what you think. (Assuming you havenāt tried it already)