Prelude No. 5 in G Minor

Nearly 10 years after writing his hugely successful Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2 (1901)—a piece that would remain a favourite during and after the composer’s lifetime—Rachmaninoff produced this gem, the Prelude in G Minor, that would become the most famous of his Op. 23 set of 10. (Rachmaninoff later returned to the prelude genre, to complete the set of 24 in 1910.) Written in simple ternary form, the G minor’s marchlike outer sections are placed in dramatic contrast with a more lyrical middle section. Though it is by no means the most technically demanding of Rachmaninoff’s preludes, the theme does require an evenness of touch and tightly sprung rhythmic vitality, so as to avoid sounding laboured or heavy. Rachmaninoff himself had huge hands—he could stretch an octave and a half at the keyboard with one hand—and would have had no difficulty bringing out the melody in the inner voice, nor the wide range of articulation that heightens this work’s expressivity, particularly in the gloriously sweeping and exotic-sounding central section. About Rachmaninoff’s Preludes It was in this genre that Rachmaninoff first made his name, with the popular Lisztian Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2, of 1892. Nearly 10 years on, inspired by Chopin’s Preludes, he returned to the genre to produce his own G-Minor Prelude—another favourite in the Op. 23 set (1901-3). Shortly after writing his Third Piano Concerto in 1909, the composer returned to the genre again, this time to finish the 24. Though not initially conceived as a set of 24, Rachmaninoff does explore contrasts in tempos and moods between preludes, and the last, in the key of D-flat major, is enharmonically related to the C-sharp minor key of the first.