Rubens thank you, I'm glad you don't think my playing looks terrible!
My hands aren't big but thankfully they aren't tiny! I can play octaves with ease and can reach a ninth depending on the circumstance. There are a couple of places where I'm rolling a tenth chord but other than that Brahms didn't put many big chords in this piece! There are quite a lot of legato octaves though. There was a local teacher I went to briefly for help when I got obsessed with Chopin Ballade No.1 (actually the piece that started my piano upgrade journey!); she used pedal to do legato seemingly everywhere and then would do whatever was easiest for her hands. I never bought into that and think you actually need to play the melody line legato for it to sound convincing. I'm able to play a slow octave with my 1st and 4th fingers so if they're adjacent notes I do a lot of 1-5 to 1-4 to 1-5 walking so that I can keep the top note legato.
I had abandon plans to play the 4th movement of the Franck violin sonata (which can stand on its own quite well without the rest of the movements) because once I started looking at it, it was filled with tenths! I started marking up the score to use my right hand to play the top notes of the left hand chords but it made it way too complicated, so I gave up 🙁 I don't know what a professional with small hands would have done, do the awkward RH substitutions? Roll everything? Skip the top note?
My Polish piano teacher had us do hand stretching exercises so my hands can reach their maximum span (pic below). Also, since I'm already taking a photo, do you ever show off your piano muscles? I tell people my hands have biceps 😆
