Melnikov Couples Composers with Keyboards

Alexander Melnikov (photograph by Marco Borggreve, from the San Francisco Performances announcement of his visit in 2018)

This coming Friday harmonia mundi will release a new solo album by keyboardist Alexander Melnikov. He has been a familiar presence here in San Francisco, primarily through the auspices of San Francisco Performances. Past programming has included two solo recitals and, most recently, a performance by his trio, whose other members are violinist Isabelle Faust and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras.

In all my articles about those occasions, I referred to him as a pianist. However, the title of his new album is Fantasie: Seven Composers, Seven Keyboards. That required a noun with a broader scope! As many are likely to assume, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders of this new release.

The seven composers are as follows:

1. Johann Sebastian Bach
2. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
4. Felix Mendelssohn
5. Frédéric Chopin
6. Ferrucio Busoni
7. Alfred Schnittke

The earliest instrument is a two-manual harpsichord created by Hans Ruckers II in 1624, but this served as a model for a reproduction made by Markus Fischinger in 2019. The most recent instrument is the Steinway D-274. This instrument has become so popular among concert pianists that it has its own Wikipedia page, which cites it as “the flagship of the Steinway & Sons piano company.”

Melnikov is clearly serious in his appreciation of how the construction (and, as a result, the sonorities) of the instrument has evolved over the centuries. In fact, he owns three of the early models:

1. Christopher Kern’s 2014 reproduction of a fortepiano made by Anton Walter in 1795
2. A fortepiano made by Alois Graff in 1828, restored by Edwin Beunk
3. An 1885 Érard piano dating from around 1885, restored by Markus Fischinger

That list leads me to wonder if Melnikov does not have his own Steinway, probably because he does not have room for it! Whatever the case may be, he clearly believes that it is important to play on an instrument whose sonorities would have been familiar to the composer.

I have to confess that I have been interested it this “proper pairing” of instrument and composer for many decades. Indeed, when I was responsible for arranging guest lecturers to visit the research laboratory where I worked in Connecticut, I managed to persuade Malcolm Bilson to give a lecture-demonstration about the eighteenth-century fortepiano. He had no trouble preparing for this, since he arrived at our lab with his instrument in his VW microbus.

Melnikov’s recording reminded me that Bilson’s visit marked the tip of an iceberg larger than I realized had existed. At the risk of tempting virulent disagreement, I would suggest that, on the basis of sonorities, the “piano as we know it” began to take shape relatively early in the nineteenth century (which, on this album, would mean the Mendelssohn selection). On the other hand, even after three or four listening experiences, I feel as if I am just beginning to get my head around the “steps to Parnassus” that lead from the eighteenth century to the contemporary Steinway.

In other words, I expect to spend a fair amount of time with this album, taking it for granted that Melnikov will be able to guide me through the six stages of transition that link Schnittke to Bach.