Prelude in G flat major Op.23 No.10 (1903) — Sergei Rachmaninov

Lilacs Op.21 No.5 (1902, arranged for piano 1913)

Prelude in G sharp major Op.32 No.12 (1910)

Daisies Op.38 No.3 (1916, arranged for piano 1940)

Prelude in D major Op.23 No.4 (1903)

Prelude in B flat major Op.23, No.2 (1903)

Including the early and notoriously popular Prelude in C sharp minor Op.3 No.2 - which the composer didn’t dislike half as much as he said he did - Rachmaninov wrote twenty-four preludes in all the keys, just as Chopin had done before him and Bach before that. The Ten Preludes, Op.23 were completed in 1903, two years after the Second Piano Concerto in C minor, and the Thirteen Preludes, Op.32, followed in 1910, a year after the Third Piano Concerto in D minor.

The Prelude in G flat major Op.23 No.10 sounds, at least to begin with, like Rachmaninov’s answer to Chopin’s in B minor - a contemplative cello melody sustained by the left hand under harmonies registered in even quavers in the right. It is more developed than the Chopin, however, both structurally and texturally. It includes an accelerating middle section of mounting passion and, on the return of the opening tempo, a luxuriantly contrapuntal elaboration of the main theme with an expressive duet relationship between the top and bottom lines.

Between the composer’s own transcriptions of two of his songs, Lilacs and Daisies, the Prelude in B minor Op.32 No.10 will no doubt sound all the more tragic by comparison with their fragrant melodiousness. Inspired by Böcklin’s painting The Return, it is nothing less than a tone poem echoing with tolling bells in both its inconsolably expressive outer sections and its strenuously orchestrated middle section. The D major Prelude Op.23 No.4 reverts to the Chopin model, although it is the earlier composer’s nocturnes rather than any of his preludes that are called to mind by this poetically harmonised recollection of ecstasy. The B flat major Prelude, Op.23, No.2, is a brilliant demonstration of what a great composer can do with a fanfare, a peal of bells and, in the middle section, an intervention of fragile melody to offset them.