Katsaris: Goodbye, Mr. Rachmaninov

About the piece.

“Goodbye, Mr. Rachmaninov” is an original piece by the pianist Cyprien Katsaris, a tribute to Rachmaninoff written in a late-Romantic language. It is in E-flat major, 66 bars long, and takes between four and five minutes. Katsaris has been playing it for a long time: the pianist Dimitris Chrisanthakopoulos was already performing it in 2009, and calls it a miniature gem with hidden voices and a singing Russian melody, and his favourite encore.

Katsaris released his own recording in 2016, as the last track of the album Elective Affinities on his label Piano 21. It was recorded in Paris in February 2016 on a Bechstein. On the album it closes a small Rachmaninoff group: a prelude by Abram Chasins, who was a friend of Rachmaninoff, then Rachmaninoff’s Prelude Op. 23 No. 2, then “Goodbye”. Katsaris wrote that the common denominator of the three is Rachmaninoff. The album also has a companion piece for Chopin, “Merci Monsieur Chopin”. He still plays “Goodbye” in recital, for example on his 2023 tour of Japan, which was dedicated to Rachmaninoff.

Listeners hear more than Rachmaninoff in it. Several point out that the melancholic opening resembles “June”, the barcarolle from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. From there the piece builds through fuller variations with octaves and inner voices, in places close to the sound of the Rachmaninoff concertos, and ends quietly at the top of the keyboard.

There is no official published edition that is easy to find, which is one reason a note-by-note tutorial is useful for this piece.

Learn it at your own speed.

This tutorial was made with LumaKeys, a Mac app for learning piano from falling notes. Open a MIDI file of the piece, or transcribe a piano recording you have, then slow it down, loop the hard bars and practise one hand at a time. The download is free.