SERGEI RACHMANINOV - ALL CANONS AND FUGUES FOR PIANO SOLO (audio + sheet music)

In between writing down his large-scale works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, and even in choral form, Sergei Rachmaninov has also composed handfuls of short works throughout his entire life, especially for piano. While he did start out his pieces with a result of his own favorite composers, Tchaikovsky and Chopin among them, he has slowly but surely evolved his own compositional style. Some of these short pieces are yet to be discovered, some unfortunately lost or destroyed, but nonetheless, the ones that have already been printed out during Rachmaninov’s lifetime or after his death do deserve attention. The ones featured here are no exception, his fugues and canons becoming one of the results of his counterpoint classes with his teachers, fellow Russian composers Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev. One of his earliest works that has survived, overall, is a piano piece in D minor, dated 1884, usually subtitled as “in canonic style“. Marked moderato in 12/8 time, it perhaps might be a