Many pieces in the piano literature are meant to be played fast, from moderately fast to lightning fast. Most students of the piano will want to work towards being able to play these pieces. However, a great majority of students will find they never get there. The main reason, in my view, is not an innate lack of ability, but rather that the technique which would allow for fast playing was never really established in the very beginning.
I recently read a blog post by someone who is a teacher and, I believe, may have a fairly large number of followers who read and heed his advice. His recent post was about "how to play fast." His main idea was that you set your metronome to a comfortable speed for the given piece, then move it up a notch at a time until you are able to play it fast. This "method" has been around for decades, if not centuries. When I was a child, I was told to do this, and that was 60 years ago! However, it doesn't work. At some point you will hit a speed which you can't manage, or at least with any accuracy. Or, you can do it, but you experience significant fatigue and even pain in your hands and arms. You don't magically acquire the proper technique just because you try to "fool" your body into going progressively faster a tiny amount at a time. The other problem with this is that using a metronome allows no possibility of any nuances of tempo and your musicality will suffer. Not to mention that this would be incredibly time-consuming.
The other item mentioned in his blog was that, for very fast playing, you need to have your fingers stay closer to the keys. This should be obvious. If you want to go fast, you need maximum efficiency. When skiers do the slalom, they ski as close to the gates as possible; even an inch too far will cause a loss of perhaps only a 100th of a second, but that's the difference between winning and not winning. Likewise, a fast passage in piano requires that you have little or no extra unnecessary motions. The problem is that this particular blogger, and the vast majority of traditional teachers, will tell you to learn to lift your fingers high when you play. The traditional exercises such as Hanon and Czerny are supposed to be done with exaggerated finger movements. The idea was that this creates strength in the fingers. I don't believe it really creates any strength to speak of (you've heard me say before that those amazing little 6-year-old prodigies don't have much strength and yet they play the big pieces). But it also creates a technique with a total lack of efficiency. This blogger did say that, although you'd need to be close to the keys for fast playing, you could go back to higher fingers for slow playing.
It would be unrealistic, however, to think you can spend hundreds, even thousands, of hours playing with raised fingers, but then magically NOT do that when you want to play fast. Your habit of raised fingers will be too well engrained to change at will. Even if you think you are staying closer to the keys, your hands are still attempting to play in the way to which they are accustomed. The reason you may experience that pain and fatigue is due to the overuse of the small muscles of the fingers. Change to a more arm-based technique and you will have no pain.
If you play slow music with highly raised fingers, you will get an ugly, chopped up, "note-wise" sound that is devoid of subtle phrasing. I'm thinking of a gorgeous Beethoven slow movement or a Nocturne by Chopin; you want the whole thing (certainly the melody) to have a silky smooth tone, which you cannot achieve with separate, highly-raised fingers.
Equally important, you cannot have two techniques, one for fast music and one for slow music. My approach is holistic. The principles that really work in one place will work everywhere. The fingers, hands, arms (even the torso) are used in synchrony for maximum efficiency and with individual finger movements "absorbed" into the larger motions of hands and arms. Not only will this type of technique enable you to play fast, it will make both slow and fast playing more beautiful.
There is one other element to being able to play fast, one that almost all other teachers overlook. That is the auditory component. Most of the emphasis is on the physical, but if the auditory is weak, the hands and fingers will not be able to keep up. I like to say that "you can only play as fast as your can hear." Often, when I am having trouble with the speed of a passage -- or, I can play it fast but not with consistent accuracy -- I transpose it several times to strengthen what I call the "auditory image." After transposition, it invariably improves, even without additional "technical" work. When the ear really knows the music, the body follows. In addition to your efforts in acquiring "technique," it is imperative to remember that the ear really runs the show, and to continually work to improve your ear.
It really annoys and concerns me that many "teachers" are still repeating the same old ideas that have been around for so long and somehow are not questioned. (See my post "Are you using 300-year-old ideas?") Just as with sports, a lot has been learned about how to use our bodies to achieve given results. Playing the piano is quite athletic, if you think about it, and the training you receive should enable you to reach your maximum potential, both physically and musically. You may know of someone who thinks they followed all the traditional advice and still became quite accomplished; there are always those few exceptions. But for every one of those, there are thousands upon thousands of people who never achieved their desires at the piano. Question everything you are told, and see if the ideas really ring true.
