Sunday Afternoon Rachmaninoff

January 26, 2020 Decker Home, Music Leave a comment

“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt – they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.” ― Sergei Rachmaninoff

Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, is a piece of music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, completed in 1901.^[1] It was included in his Opus 23 set of ten preludes, despite having been written two years earlier than the other nine. Rachmaninoff himself premiered the piece in Moscow on February 10, 1903, along with Preludes No. 1 and 2 from Op. 23.^[1]

Emil Gilels played this prelude at a front in World War II, in support for the Soviet military forces fighting in the war. The narrator says (in Russian): “Gilels is playing at the front, to remind us what the war is worth fighting for: Immortal music!”^{[2] – via wikipedia.org}