Rachmaninoff Preludes by Guillaume Vincent

Rachmaninoff spent most of his life trying to escape the C-sharp minor prelude. He wrote it at nineteen, published it as op. 3, no. 2, watched it follow him from Moscow to Dresden to the Steinway Hall in New York, and never quite got free. The piece became a kind of brilliant albatross — the thing audiences demanded, the thing he played with increasing weariness, the thing that threatened to reduce a body of work of extraordinary range and depth to a single calling card. Which is one reason the twenty-four preludes that followed it, spread across op. 23 and op. 32, matter so much. They are his answer: here is what I can actually do.

Guillaume Vincent is twenty-one years old, and already he knows this.

His C-sharp minor prelude is very slow — achingly, almost willfully slow, with pauses that seem to last longer than they do, silences that gather weight before the next massive chord falls. It could be self-indulgent. Somehow it isn’t. The effect is almost geological, as though the music were being excavated rather than performed, and the famous three-note motto that opens the piece arrives with a gravity that makes you hear it fresh. Whether that freshness survives repeated listening is a fair question. But on first encounter, it’s startling.

What’s equally startling is what comes right after. The first prelude of op. 23, in f-sharp minor, is urgent, pressed forward, almost impatient — as though Vincent spent all his deliberateness on the opening piece and now has somewhere to be. The contrast is too sharp to be accidental. This is a pianist thinking about architecture, about how pieces relate to each other, about what it means to play a complete cycle rather than a collection of individual showpieces.

Not every idea lands. The d major prelude, op. 23, no. 4, is too plain — the melody sings well enough, but the inner voices lack the kind of subtle harmonic coloring that makes this deceptively cheerful piece actually interesting. The e minor of op. 32 doesn’t find its epic dimension; it stays on the surface when it should be plunging. And the b minor prelude, op. 32, no. 10 — which is, to my ears, the single greatest of the twenty-four, a piece of such compressed emotional violence that it can make your chest tight — is pedestrian here. It needs ferocity, weight, a kind of pianistic ruthlessness. Constance Keene, in her cycle, brought exactly that: a titanic reading, all but forgotten now, that deserves to be heard. Sviatoslav Richter, in his various traversals of these pieces, understood that the b minor is not a lyric piece wearing dark clothes but something closer to a catastrophe in slow motion. Vincent plays it as though it were the former.

The g minor prelude from op. 23, the march, is another matter entirely — clipped, brutal, the left hand almost percussive, the whole thing suggesting a military procession that has lost its sense of ceremony. It’s one of the best things on the recording.

The op. 32 collection is, as a whole, more searching and less immediately gratifying than op. 23, and it shows Rachmaninoff in the years just before his long compositional silence — the decade between the Third Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini during which he wrote almost nothing. The op. 32 preludes have a valedictory quality, especially the final one in d-flat major, a piece that floats between Rachmaninoff’s own harmonic world and something closer to late Chopin. Vincent takes it very broadly — a full minute and a half longer than Steven Osborne’s beautifully calibrated account on Hyperion — and the Chopin connection is something he seems to understand and deliberately court. Whether the tempo is quite defensible is another matter. But it is genuinely radiant.

The piano itself is worth mentioning. The Steinway D used for this disc has an unusual warmth in the lower register — the bass notes bloom rather than thud — and the upper range has a clarity without brittleness that suits Rachmaninoff’s long melodic lines particularly well. Whether credit belongs to the instrument, the microphones, the hall, or Vincent’s own touch is impossible to say. The sound is simply gorgeous.

For anyone wanting safer ground, Osborne’s Hyperion set remains the benchmark for the complete cycle — elegant, intelligent, thoroughly considered. Eldar Nebolsin is another reliable guide. Santiago Rodriguez brought a particular Spanish warmth to this music that still sounds distinctive. And Richter, in his several recordings of individual preludes and partial cycles, remains in a category largely by himself.

Vincent is something else: a young pianist who is plainly not content to interpret these pieces the way they’ve been interpreted before, who takes real risks and occasionally falls, and whose best moments suggest that the risks are worth taking. The unevenness is real, and a more seasoned critic than I might hold it more firmly against him. But at twenty-one, thinking this independently about music this demanding — that’s not a minor thing. It’s the beginning of something.