Week THREE: Birthday Week!
Hello and welcome to the WEEK THREE Main Thread for this challenge! 
Alright everyone - this is the thread where we'll all be posting our daily updates.
Make sure you've read the rules before replying (<- click)
Twice a week between March 27- April 1, I hope to be reading your daily updates in this very thread right here!
Here is this week's assignment!
Submit a Recording!
This Recording can be of yourself playing some of Rachmaninoff's music, it could be your favorite recording of him playing, or a different pianist playing his music!
We are gathering videos to put together into a collage for this weekend's Watch Party, and Birthday Celebration to honor this great Composer!
Watch Party:
April 1st at 11am Pacific time
https://app.tonebase.co/piano/live/player/pno-rachmaninoff-birthday-celebration
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Hi all, here's our recording of my wife Kay Hanna playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 32 #11. We haven't found anything written about the history of this piece, although apparently many of the Preludes in Opus 32 were inspired by Rachmaninoff's memories of life in Russia. Kay started reading through this Prelude for the first time shortly after the challenge was announced, but most of her actual work-up came in the past week. She believes she has a strong sense of what Rachmaninoff was trying to express in the piece at a musical level, but as yet she has no words for it.
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Randall Wayne beautiful!
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Randall Wayne Lovely colours and sounds! Thank you!
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Randall Wayne Love it, Kay! Beautiful and gentle!
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Thank you for your kind comments about No 5. Here is No. 3 from Six Moment Musicaux.
I had hoped to record No. 4 as well but I don鈥檛 know it well enough yet and it is just messy but you can hear it here - https://youtu.be/I0eyjeWOmnM
or hear the man himself play all of these six pieces here - https://youtu.be/6wv-qQY65b8
Looking forward to the concert tomorrow evening (evening for me!)
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Angela Fogg #3 sounds really good too! Great that your learning so many of them! Looking forward to hearing #4 soon
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Lots of really nice playing and beautiful music on this thread. Here's my attempt at the A Major Prelude. Op.32 No. 8. Still has a long way to go.
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Peter Golemme Sorry it's Op. 32 No. 9, not 8. But still A Major!
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Peter Golemme Powerful and passionate playing, Bravo!
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Juan Carlos Olite Thank you JC. It's a very powerful piece. All too easy to blur everything with the pedal. I need the pedal to sustain the top notes of most of the falling sixths, but there's all kinds of stuff going on while those are falling, so you can't just set & forget it...I find it all really difficult to manage, and that's not even counting the notes! but that's the CHALLENGE of these beautiful pieces!
Speaking of powerful, I loved your C# Minor Prelude. And it was totally free of the blurring that I'm wrestling with here. Great job on that.
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Peter Golemme Sounds amazing!
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Vidhya Bashyam Thank you Vidhya. I enjoyed your take on Daisies very much. Delicate and introspective. I can see the Daisy petals fluttering bravely in the early spring wind.
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Peter Golemme Thank you so much! A lot of work remaining but very rewarding to learn Rachmaninoff.
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Hi all - looks like the G major prelude is the flavour of the season! Here is my take on it.
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Rohan Sounds great, Rohan! Very well sung!
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Rohan Beautiful playing!
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very beautiful Rohan & very polished. I hear the D and E in the LH throughout (and of course Eb in the minor interlude), standing out from the surrounding chord tones without intruding on the RH melody. perfectly balanced. Very difficult to pull off, I can say from lots of experience in trying to get it to sound that way...
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I'd like to add that I just discovered this challenge last week (day job keeps me from ToneBase sometimes), but I wish it could go on for much longer! One of my lifelong projects is to play these Preludes with some modest degree of competency and this challenge was really helpful here. My A Major Prelude got noticeably better, much better, in the week that I spent preparing for this recording. I had been working on it off & on for a long time before that, having hit a wall without making much progress. But "nothing focuses the mind like a hanging" as they say. Knowing I was going to put it out there for others to listen to really made me focus on the many parts that needed cleaning up. It's still got a long way to go, but you should have heard it before! Just saying, many of us are out here working in isolation and ToneBase is providing us a fantastic way to be part of a community of like minded musicians. Thank you Dominic and everyone sharing their thoughts and music here.
