This week there were no notable breakthroughs. I'm working on Rachmaninov's "Lilacs," but due to its difficulties it's going to be a longer term piece. I can manage the difficulties hands separate, but together is a different beast.
I also received Czerny's Op. 299 in the mail. It's an opportunity to break out of my comfort zone of slowish lyrical works and work on technique and faster figurations, which I'm really looking forward to. That is really the final frontier of my technique, as I've worked on everything technical, have strengthened and worked on coordination on my hand and weaker fingers, have painstakingly solved many issues of tension, but I just haven't worked on sustained speed. I've resolved to a greater attention to detail, which is why I've enrolled in lessons, and I think I can finally approach this kind of thing maturely (I was athletic when I was younger, so I have a tendency for things that seem physically involved to go all out, which can be and has been damaging at the piano). So I can finally connect brain and ear to hand and go to the lab with this kind of work. My general method is to do a read through of the piece I'm working on to get the lay of the land, then to set an achievable goal (like setting a quarter to 100 bpm), work on tone and fluidity, then set a secondary goal (like 120 bpm) to try to do similar work under more exertion. I could probably go faster than that, but I want to focus on tone, smoothness, and also variety, not wanting to get into repetitive stress-type work.