Alexander Melnikov

The festival appearance of Alexander Melnikov promises something truly unique. This graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, whose musical coming of age was defined by his encounters with the legendary Sviatoslav Richter, is one of the most sought-after and most original pianists on today’s classical scene. He appears with the likes of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His lifelong interest in historically informed interpretation led him to perform on period keyboard instruments and to his collaboration with ensembles such as the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. He has won awards at the Robert Schumann International Competition in Zwickau and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. The audience at the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival will be taken on a genuine musical journey through time. The stage of the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall will accommodate five keyboard instruments from various historical eras – a Baroque harpsichord, two fortepianos, a French Romantic instrument from the workshop of Ignaz Pleyel, hailed for its soft, mellow sound, and a modern Steinway grand. Melnikov will begin the concert with the earliest model, on which he will perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. With works by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Chopin, he will shift along an imaginary timeline from one instrument to the next until, drawing on the music of Alexander Scriabin and Alfred Schnittke, he will arrive at the modern piano, bringing this imaginative concert to a close. When the pianist recorded this programme on CD for harmonia mundi France, critic Ivan Hewett, writing for the British Telegraph, gave the recording a full five stars, describing it as “the most engrossing thing I’ve heard in months.”