April 2023:   Everybody knows and recognises Sergei Rachmaninoff's old warhorse, the Prelude in C# Minor Opus 3 No 2. It is indeed one of the most spectacular, clangorous, impressive, vulgar, noisy short pieces ever written for the piano. (There are a few words about it here). Although I have played part of it, on and off, for at least forty years, it took a year to refresh, memorise and practice the complete work. Can I play it fast enough, and unblemished? No, but I get satisfaction from trying, and doing so has improved my technique immensely. I should have done this years ago. Now that the C# is done, if not dusted, what next? The Scriabin Etude Opus 8 No 12 is magnificent, full of power and soaring lyricism. And full of impossible demands on the left hand. Reluctantly I put that to one side and returned to Rachmaninoff, the prelude in G Minor, Opus 23 No 5. This is another well-known piece, probably coming second in popularity to the C# Minor. It has a strong marching beat, a lovely sweeping lyrical middle section, and a frenetic madness in the last page, before dying away to end on a simple pianissimo G octave quaver. The prelude is one of ten comprising Opus 23. It was written in 1901, two years before the other nine were completed, and first played by Rachmaninoff in Moscow in 1903, a full ten years after the C# prelude. Rachmaninoff considered the Opus 23 preludes to be 'far better music' than the Opus 3 set, but had to concede that the public preferred the earlier preludes. He never threw off the shackle of the C# Minor, and came to regret ever composing it. The sheet music of the G Minor is easily available free online. There are several variants available, due to lack of access to the original manuscripts. Whichever is used is down to luck, choice or availability. The G Minor prelude runs at a continuously faster pace than the C# - it slows a little in the lyrical middle section - and I would say is possibly a grade or so more difficult than the C#, a grade 10 on the ABRSM and an 11 on the RCM and LCM scales (as oppsed to the C#'s grade 9 or 10). There are some unfathomable chordal harmonies, especially when playing slowly through the piece, which made me think I had forgotten a few accidentals, but no, that's how it is. There are some glorious augmented fifth chords as well. I found the lovely middle section more difficult to master than the dramatic march, and I will never master the central counterpoint of the second half of this section. But few notice anyway. The G Minor prelude is, despite being just as forbidding and virtuostic as he C# prelude, surprisingly graspable. Although it has it's own challenges - I found the quick succession of chords in bars 6 and 7 needed a lot of practice - there are no fancy trills and no terrifyingly fast chromatic runs of interlocking minor thirds. It is within the grasp of an advanced amateur pianist. As with the C#, it's great fun to (attempt) to play. I'm not going to count the notes, surely there is software to do that. But I can't help noticing that the maximum notes in a bar, in bars 22 and 69, is 116 plus two accidentals - far exceeding the C#'s measly maximum of 64 notes in a bar. Fortunately they are in one double octave and fourteen repetetive groups of eight notes, quite easy to play. The prelude is in the key of G Minor, which has two flats, and is 86 bars long, nearly 50% longer than the C#, six pages instead of four. It's also in Common Time (4/4), played at a much faster rate than the C#. The piece takes a professional pianist around 3.40 minutes to complete, all those extra bars squeezed into forty seconds fewer than the C#. Can I play it? Well, as with the C#, yes and no. At the moment not as well as the C#. I have memorised every note so that I don't need the sheet music apart from a few spot checks now and again. It has taken me a little over two months to memorise the piece, a few hundred more run-throughs and I will be reasonably competent. Is it more fun to play than the C#? It's not quite as hackneyed, it has more thematic variety and is less thumpy than the C#. So my verdict is yes, it is. Although I have had piano lessons in the far distant past, like many others I didn't practice as I should. Well, I didn't practice at all. Scales were the Devil's punishment on mankind. I worked in the building trade for 18 years, and I have never taken, or even been entered in, any musical examination. I'm just an ageing amateur fortunate enough to own a Kemble K121ZT. Both the C# and the G Minor prelude are playable, impressive, without too onerous technical demands, and are above all great fun to play at any age or standard. I would encourage anyone to attempt these pieces, even in a simplified form. They will provide great pleasure and satisfaction, at the expense of more frequent piano tuning. Just go for it. As for the Scriabin, who knows?   You can return to my home page here If you have any questions, comments, corrections or criticisms at all then I'd be pleased to hear them: please email me at kes at kcall dot co dot uk. © Webmaster. All rights reserved.