Lyapunov: Prelude Op. 6 No. 3

About the piece.

The seven Preludes Op. 6 were published by Bote & Bock in Berlin in 1896, the same year and city as Lyapunov’s first piano concerto. He was working at the Imperial Chapel in St Petersburg at the time, a few years after collecting folk songs with Balakirev for the Imperial Geographical Society. The keys of the seven preludes are related by thirds, and the set is meant to be played as a whole, with only short pauses in between.

No. 3 is in E-flat minor and marked Lento, the slowest of the seven. It is only 25 bars long: a one-bar introduction and three eight-bar phrases. The left hand plays wide broken chords in steady triplets, while the right hand sings a slow melody that splits into two voices. The climax comes near the end, forte and in the highest register, before the piece falls back to pianissimo.

The set is rarely recorded. Only two complete recordings are easy to find: Marco Rapetti’s on Dynamic from 1999, the performance this tutorial is made from, and Florian Noack’s from 2015 on his second Lyapunov album, which won a Diapason d’Or.

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.