Uploaded May 2009 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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While browsing my recently acquired Urtext edition of all of Lyadov's piano music I came across this little piece (from op 40, one etude and three preludes, no 3: prelude) which I had never heard of before.

I was stunned by so little notes exhibiting so strong emotion. It's a very Russian piece. It reminds me also of the Elegie op 40 no 2 of Sergei Michailovich Liapunov.

Despite the score not indicating any pedal marks, I've added pedal to my own taste (which as it goes with amateurs is probably too much). I took the liberty of adding pedal because in all of his music there's not a single pedal mark indicated, so I'm inclined to believe the rumor that Lyadov was a lazy composer, and didn't bother to write down any pedal marks, leaving the decision to the performer.

Some technical data:
The piano is a yamaha gt2 digital grand piano. The sound is recorded on a boss br 600 multitrack recorder (dry recording mode). The video is recorded using a panasonic SD20 camera in 1440x1080/50i mode and far from ideal light conditions. First audio was stripped from the video and the video was converted from the heavy AVCHD format to something which can be handled more real-time on my laptop using ffmpeg via kdenlive (using the predefined youtube profile). Afterwards sound and title screen was mixed in and everything was rendered again to an mp4 file (again using the predefined youtube profile in kdenlive). Everything was done on a laptop running debian linux sid. Kdenlive and ffmpeg, mlt and mlt++ are svn versions of 8 may compiled from source.

NOTE: Youtube's compression did some weird things to the sound.