Découvrez la vidéo Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Var.XVIII - Rachmaninoff de Mark Fowler sur Le Fil YouTube de Piano Partage.

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Me playing this beautiful romantic piano piece by Sergei Rachmaninov, composed in 1934, and is probably his most popular and well known composition. This is only the 18th variation of a total of 24! Playing the whole set or rather complete piece is far more of a test it has to be said, this variation stands out from the set of variations though. It has been used in numerous movies, including 'Groundhog Day' and 'Somewhere in Time' (this movie in particular used the music to great emotional effect).

This was quite difficult to play being Rachmaninov thats no surprise as it full of complex harmonies and thick chords. My greatest difficulty was memorising the piece due to large amount of notes Rachmaninov always uses in his music, and the lack of patterns of notes to make it easier to memorise. Its fair to say this took a number of recordings to get it right 🙂

If you are familiar with the composition on the whole you can hear I use the ending of variation XVII to lead onto the 18th variation, this is just for effect as I think its a sublime part of the variation and leads onto XVIII beautifully.

The theme itself comes from the last of Paganini's twenty-four Caprices Op 1 for solo violin. This piece by Paganini has inspired many other composers to play around with its theme too, such as Brahms, Liszt and even Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Variation XVIII is based on an inversion of Paganini's main motif and is a glorious lyrical outporing.

The version I play in this video is a piano solo arrangement by Robert Schultz, found in an excellent advanced piano transcription book I found many years ago now.

Sheet music of this arrangement can be downloaded here - http://schultzmusic.com/product/eighteenth-variation-from-rhapsody-on-a-theme-of-paganini/

Thanks for listening

Mark 🙂