Rachmaninoff: The Complete Preludes for Piano
Rachmaninoff turned to the piano prelude as a genre early on in his life.  In 1892, the 19-year-old musician penned Prelude in C♯ minor, op. 3 (N° 2), which to this day remains one of his most recognizable compositions.   The first cycle comprised of ten preludes (opus 23) came about gradually.  A few initial outlines appeared as early as 1899.  Around 1901, Rachmaninoff had completed Prelude in G minor—a grotesque, eerie, dreamlike march, with a lyrical theme of astonishing beauty.  When and where the remaining pieces of the first cycle were exactly composed is unknown.  What is certain, however, is that the entire cycle was completed by early 1903.  The composer did not revisit the genre until seven years later, when he was residing at his country estate in central Russia.  There, in an astonishingly brief period, he composed all of the 13 preludes comprising opus 32.  The literal and figurative closure of the tonal circle now took place, and a new, monumental work of immense power and depth entered the piano repertoire of the 20th century. Rachmaninoff was always in awe of nature and of life around him.  The plethora of sounds he found there fed his creative genius and, in turn, his art.  Indeed, the initial theme introduced in his Prelude in G major, op. 32 (N° 5), which is primarily conversational in nature, eventually escapes and soars upward, becoming a delicate, tremolo-rich interplay of sounds, among which one can hear a bird song, a water stream trickling, a sudden gust of the wind. The emotional world of Rachmaninoff’s preludes is complex—elegiac, tragic or idyllic can all appropriately describe it—but its inner harmony is invariably all-encompassing and complete, on par with the rest of the art of this great master. Viacheslav Kartsovnik, University of Hamburg