The Latin GRAMMY-nominated pianist fuses one of classical music’s most demanding preludes with Cuban Timba and Afro-Cuban Abakúa rhythm on his new single.
Joachim Horsley has spent more than a decade building a body of work that refuses easy categorisation. The Latin GRAMMY-nominated pianist and composer has long occupied a distinctive corner of contemporary music, one where Caribbean and African rhythmic traditions meet the Western classical canon head-on. Today he releases “Havana Prelude,” a new single that arranges Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23 No. 5) inside the frameworks of Cuban Timba and the Afro-Cuban Abakúa rhythm.
The piece marks the first time Horsley has brought Rachmaninoff into his orbit. Op. 23 No. 5 is not easy material: its wide leaps and relentless block chords place it firmly in demanding repertoire, and Horsley’s arrangement makes no apology for that. He keeps the technical weight of the original intact, then lays Cuban dance rhythms across it, arriving somewhere that feels both rigorous and alive.
“Rachmaninoff is a very special composer, and combining his music with dance rhythms from Cuba is an angle I hope people find as a fresh offering of a legendary classic.”
— Joachim Horsley
The creative thread runs back to a trip Horsley made to Cuba in 2015, when an already deep connection to the island’s music sharpened his thinking about how canonical works might be rethought through Caribbean idioms. That instinct produced previous releases including “Beethooven In Havana,” which helped establish him as a serious voice in this space and earned him a Latin GRAMMY nomination for Best Arrangement with “Bach’s Cuban Concerto for Piano and Tres.”
The recording itself grew from an unusual process. During Horsley’s 2025 European tour, he tracked the rhythm section at School Farm Studios in England with his live band: Murphy Aucamp on drums and timbales, Yonathan “Morocho” Gavidia on percussion, and Damian Nueva-Cortes on bass. They worked against a demo sketch of the piano, locking in the feel of Cuban music before a single melodic note was committed. Horsley then took that foundation back to Los Angeles, where he recorded his final piano performance on a Steinway D, the arrangement still evolving around what the rhythm section had already shaped. The result is a recording built from the pulse outward.
“Havana Prelude” is the first single from Horsley’s forthcoming album and video series, Supervision, expected later in 2026 or early 2027. He has said he hopes the arrangement enters the active repertoire of other pianists, as his previous works have. For now, it stands on its own: a meeting of two musical worlds that, in Horsley’s hands, turns out to have been waiting to happen.
Listen to “Havana Prelude”
