Hi.

I'm just wondering what sort of level (grade/diploma-wise) people here think Rachmaninov's Prelude in C-sharp minor (Op. 3 no. 2) is?

It's just i've been searching around for the music for ages (i heard someone playing it at an amateur concert once...didn't have a clue what it was called or anything)

But that was about 10 years ago and i thought "i could never play anything like that" and now it's well within my capabilities

Thanks.

If you have a merit in Grade 8 you should be able to tackle it.
I often think it in some way is similar to the Chopin Fantasie Impromtu in the same key

I seem to remember it was on the ATCL syllabus a while ago.

Thanks for the quick replies hehe.

I've tried the Fantasie Impromptu as well but that seems substantially more difficult than this to me.

Only thing is, I've got quite small hands so I'm trying all this stuff and finding I can't span the intervals

But I was so pleased when I found this Rachmaninov because I haven't tried any of his stuff before.
And to be honest, I just wanted some reassurance that I was still progressing from Grade 8 instead of staying at that level (because since the exam, my teacher has only really gone through more Grade 8 pieces.

But then again, my teacher was showing me these Grade 8 pieces from about 20 years ago or more, and they seem like Grade 6 or so in today's standards.

I played this piece when i was younger, at a school open day, and though i don't know anything about exams, i'd guess it would be around Grade 8. I have no wish to play it anymore as i find it quite dull, even if it is a bit showy...however i dream of learning his later sets of preludes which are inspired masterpieces. And considerably more difficult.

I do not believe there has been much change in degree of difficulty of piano pieces over the years, if anything I'd say a little easier (particularly in current syllabus) You used to have to do a whole Sonata for list B at Grade 8 until a few years ago, certainly my daughter did in about 1994.
In Organ syllabus , however they are definitely more difficult than when I did Grade 8 in 1964.

....

Interesting that you say that ...

At around that time (when you did Grade-8 organ), I was drifting away from the piano to the organ (which I later stopped playing), but I wanted to have a go at Grade-8 piano. The only piece I recognised on the Grade-8 list was Chopin's Fantasy Impromptu. So I tried quite hard to learn it for a couple of months before eventually giving up: I was playing wrong notes and couldn't make it feel right. And I thought: if that was the standard required for Grade 8, I had no chance of passing.

Then, I went to university and someone there played his Grade-8 piano pieces to me. A jaw-dropping experience. I just kept on thinking "I could play that ... I could play that ...". So ... the Grade-8 pieces weren't all equally difficult.

I then had a period of a bit more than a year when I practiced the organ a lot. I wondered whether I was playing at Grade-8 standard, so I looked at the list of pieces and realised that, not only were they much easier than what I was playing, but also the standard of difficulty in the organ pieces looked significantly below the corresponding piano grades.

... so, judging by what you say, fsharpminor, it looks like someone at AB must also have noticed that and adjusted the standard.