Three Preludes for Piano

Gershwin played five preludes at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York on 4 December 1926, at a recital shared with the contralto Marguerite d'Alvarez, and repeated the group in Boston the following January. He published only three of them, in 1927, dedicating the set to Bill Daly, the conductor and arranger who worked closely with him. The three are fast, slow, fast: the middle one, in C sharp minor, is a blues over a walking bass. Gershwin had planned a cycle of twenty-four preludes and never went further.