Prelude No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 847, is a keyboard composition written by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the second prelude and fugue in the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
The Prelude No 15 in D-Flat Major, nicknamed “Raindrop”, strikes one at first as an oasis of peace and calm. However, the transition from the bright key of D-Flat Major to the tenebrous C sharp minor brings dark, gloomy, disturbing sonorities.
Chopin Prelude No 8, in F sharp minor, counters the calm simplicity of the seventh with a broad stream of sonority of peculiar beauty, diffused in rising and falling waves of airy figuration. Among its admirers was Witold Lutosławski, who called it a ‘wonder’.
Prelude No. 24 is the last one of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, a set of short pieces for the piano, one in each of the twenty-four keys, originally published in 1839. Frédéric Chopin wrote them between 1835 and 1839.
Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Prelude No. 3 is a guitar piece subtitled “Homenagem a Bach” (Homage to Bach). It is in the key of A minor, and is the third of the Five Preludes, written in 1940.
Chopin’s Prelude No 4 in E minor is one of the 24 preludes opus 28 for piano. By Frédéric Chopin’s request, this piece was played at his own funeral, along with Mozart’s Requiem.
Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 10 in B minor (Op. 32), was written in 1910 along with the other twelve pieces. Sergei Rachmaninoff was inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s painting Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming or The Return).
Prelude and Fugue in A minor, is a piece of organ music written by Bach sometime around his years as court organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar (1708–1717). Because of the piece’s overall rhapsodic nature, many organists play this piece freely, and in a variety of tempi.
In the Prelude No 9 in E major we hear the gravity of loftiness and depth. It is often called a march-hymn prelude, and it does indeed display hymn-like elements and a gravity and sublimity of character.
Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 5 in G minor, was completed in 1901. It was included in his Opus 23 set of ten preludes, despite having been written two years earlier than the other nine.
