These recordings are found automatically, and the machine still gets it wrong. One click from you — yes or no — fixes the catalogue for every musician who opens this page after you. Across our 10,000 works, your answer is our only real quality check.
An arrangement or transcription is fine: if you recognise the work, answer yes. Answer no if it is a different work, a different composer, or if the recording does not play.
-
Play — Rachmaninoff Prelude Op. 23, No. 1 in F-sharp minor (Anna Fedorova) · AnnaFedorovaPianist (the player loads on click)
Is this the right work?
No account is required and no personal data is collected.
Estimated from our difficulty score, not taken from an exam syllabus. Checked against 333 works on the ABRSM syllabus: the exact grade is right 7 times out of 10, and within one grade 99 times out of 100.
Difficulty estimate by MusicCoach on a scale of 1 to 100.
Most works cluster between 45 and 65: a small score gap often marks a real step. The highlighted bar shows this work among those for the same instrument.
The MusicCoach difficulty measures a work's overall demands (technique, reading, stamina) on a shared 0-100 scale, consolidated from editorial and pedagogical reference points (Henle, exam syllabuses, curation) and our own analyses. It measures neither musical value nor the practice time YOU will need: two musicians of the same level can experience the same work very differently depending on their strengths (hands used to octaves, quick sight-reading…). The confidence reflects how many reference points sit behind the score and how well they agree — a lightly documented score is flagged “to validate”. For a truly personal bearing, the diagnostic and your space compare each work to YOUR estimated level, which the score alone cannot do.
Does this rating look right to you?
This rating is computed automatically from heterogeneous sources. It gets things wrong, sometimes badly. If you know this work, your answer is worth more than our computation: it tells us which ratings to review.
Each suggestion combines difficulty gap, risk, confidence and skill overlap. The first two cards in each column are the most useful pedagogically.
The safest next step.
A genuine step up, without a jolt.
A useful leap with guided practice.
This prelude projects a dark, forceful character built on heavy chords and an inner line that must sound continuously singing despite the harmonic accents; it conveys restrained tension rather than straightforward melancholy. Technically, you will need to focus on Legato (3.3/5) — here that means linking voices by maintaining finger connection and guiding with the forearm so the melody does not break between chords — and on Control of touch (2.5/5), required to balance the weight of the bass chords while preserving clarity of the harmonic texture without crushing the main line. In Rachmaninoff's output, this piece belongs to the set of Preludes of Op.23 and sits within his substantial solo piano repertoire, illustrating his taste for dramatic miniature pieces.