Sergei Rachmaninoff embarked on his compositional career with five short piano pieces, which he presented for the first time in December 1892 in a concert in Charkow (now Kharkiv). The second piece, with the unremarkable title “Prélude”, is the famous Prélude in C sharp minor which was soon played throughout the world and was to become Rachmaninoff’s most-performed encore. But the other pieces, quite different in character, continue to enjoy general popularity amongst pianists to this day. For they are all “typical” Rachmaninoff and at the same time technically easy to master, even for amateurs. The edition is based on the first edition and the autograph preserved in the Glinka Museum, Moscow. As well as the original version of 1892, this Urtext edition also includes two revisions which Rachmaninoff made of Mélodie and Sérénade almost 50 years later in the USA, thereby allowing a direct insight into his changed pianistic ideas. The fingering is by the Rachmaninoff expert Marc-André Hamelin.
