Isabelle Faust, Anne-Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 54:40 minutes | 1,92 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann’s chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.
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Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Chopin, Rachmaninoff: Cello Sonatas (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:08 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
After Beethoven, Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras now turn to two more giants of the repertory. Chopin’s Cello Sonata, his last work published in his lifetime, seems almost like a testament, sombre and tormented – a world away from the radiance and surging lyricism of the youthful work by Rachmaninoff that it inspired. These two masterpieces by composers from the two chronological extremities of Romanticism, both pianists above all, are ideally placed in perspective here.
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Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov, Pablo Heras-Casado, Freiburger Barockorchester – Schumann: Violin Concerto, Piano Trio No.3 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:36 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
In the autumn of 1851 Schumann composed, in rapid succession, the two violin sonatas and, in the space of just seven days from 2 to 9 October, the Piano Trio no.3, Op.110. As always during his work, Schumann was oblivious to everything around him, neglected social obligations, and isolated himself – even from Clara. ‘Robert is working very assiduously on a trio for piano, violin, and cello,’ she confided to her diary, ‘but he won’t let me hear anything of it until he has quite finished it – all I know is that it’s in G minor.’
This trio, like all his other chamber works with piano, was tailor-made for Clara to play and right from the first rehearsal session in the domestic circle she went into a veritable frenzy of delight: ‘It is original, absolutely full of passion, especially the scherzo, which sweeps one away to the wildest depths’, Just a little bit of that same enthusiasm would probably have spared the Violin Concerto a great deal of opprobrium: Clara witheld the score, as did the dedicatee, Joachim. It was finally premiered in Berlin on 26 November 1937, more than 80 years after it was composed, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm and the violinist Georg Kulenkampff. Yehudi Menuhin had the privilege of making the first commercial recording, produced in the following year, 1938, with the New York Philharmonic under its British principal conductor John Barbirolli.
This first volume in a trilogy comprising the complete concertos and piano trios of Schumann brings together two late and unjustly neglected works. The instigators of the project, Isabelle Faust, Alexandre Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras, champion their cause with a force of conviction and a choice of instruments that restore the delicate transparency and subtlety of their textures. The next release will be of the Piano Concerto and Piano Trio No. 2.
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Alexander Melnikov, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Teodor Currentzis – Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Concertos (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:14:09 minutes | 628 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
The programming of this recording by Alexander Melnikov seems to be no accident. The two large, witty, outward-looking piano concertos surround the more grave, inward-facing Violin Sonata the way a sonata’s or concerto’s two fast movements surround a slow movement. It’s also a real reflection of Melnikov as a performer, schooled in the Russian tradition and mentored by Richter (the pianist of the first public performance of the Violin Sonata), who is as comfortable as a soloist as he is as a collaborative pianist playing chamber music. In that regard, Melnikov and Faust make their parts of the sonata equal partners in the music, bringing out the smallest details. It is generally held that the sonata is about death, and these two handle it with intensity and seriousness, but do not make it grim or frightful. In the concertos, Melnikov and conductor Teodor Currentzis are also well matched. In the slow movements, especially of the Concerto No. 2, Melnikov’s touch is so soft and phrasing so lyrical as to give the music a sweetness normally associated with a Rachmaninov or Ravel concerto, and Currentzis follows his lead. The animation in the fast movements, where Shostakovich likes to use rapidly repeated notes, is not pointedly sharp, but is impressive and extremely engaging nonetheless. The finale of Concerto No. 1, when everyone — including the very precise trumpeter Jeroen Berwaerts — gets going together is almost precipitously exciting. Yet it is Melnikov’s sensitivity of touch that distinguishes his performance of these works from others’. – by Patsy Morita
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Andreas Staier, Alexander Melnikov – Schubert: Fantasie in F Minor & other piano duets (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:00 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
“I have composed a big sonata and variations for four hands, and the latter have met with a specially good reception here, but I do not entirely trust Hungarian taste, and I shall leave it to you and to the Viennese to decide their true merit” So wrote Franz Schubert in 1824, evoking the popular 19th-century genre for 4-hands piano that publishers were always pestering him to write for. In his brief life Schubert devoted 32 compositions to this form and the least of these pieces, be it a lndler, polonaise or march, radiates with all of his finesse and sensitivity. Three are incontestable masterpieces, in the same rank as his sonatas or quartets: the Variations D813, the Fantasie D 940 and the Rondo D 951. All three date from the composer’s final years, a period that gave birth to his most accomplished works.
In concert, Andreas Staier and Alexander Melnikov have played Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, with Staier at the harpsichord, alongside Shostakovich’s ’24 Preludes and Fugues’, with Melnikov at the piano. Sharing a keyboard evidently suits them just as well; their unique musical complicity bringing together four hands and two immense talents.
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Alexander Melnikov – Fantasie: Seven Composers, Seven Keyboards (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:21 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
lover of historical keyboard instruments, Alexander Melnikov has already successfully met the challenge of exploring ‘Four Pieces, Four Pianos’ on disc and in concert back in 2018. Today, he has chosen to perform seven emblematic works of the fantasia genre on harpsichord, fortepiano, tangent piano, early grands, and so on. In this journey through the keyboards of time, we can discover these pieces as they sounded at the time of their creation, but also grasp the invisible thread that links them to each other.
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Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Beethoven: Complete Works for Violoncello and Piano (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:18:41 minutes | 2,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
There are curiously few complete cycles of Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano, given that the five, unlike the violin sonatas, were almost equally distributed among the composer’s early, middle, and late periods, and that each one was in its way a formally daring work. The last two sonatas in particular, with their mysteriously lyrical third relations and compact finales, fugal in the case of the Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102/2, might be regarded as having inaugurated Beethoven’s late period. Cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and pianist Alexander Melnikov (here playing a modern piano unlike on the trio recording the pair made with violinist Isabelle Faust) have an efficient, quick, tough style that beautifully fits these late sonatas. They do well in the two sonatas of Op. 5, not trying to impose an artificial shape on what must have been at the time shockingly long opening movements. The Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69, might want a bit more broad middle-period sweep and lyricism, but you get several bonuses here: a trio of variations for cello and piano from the years around 1800 that are almost never played, and uncannily direct sound from Harmonia Mundi, working in Berlin’s Teldex Studios. A worthy Beethoven cello set in every way.
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Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 2 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:22 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Using period instruments, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov breathe new life into these ‘sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment’, a tradition Mozart renewed from within, blazing the trail for Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. The first volume was widely praised:
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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Weber: Sonatas for Piano & Violin, Piano Quartet (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:09 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
The unjustly neglected piano quartet (J76) was completed in September of the year 1809, which the 22-year-old Weber spent in Stuttgart. It was originally offered to the publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, but he rejected it, advising the composer that it created wanton ‘confusion in the arrangement of its ideas’ and indeed too obviously imitated the ‘bizarreries’ of Beethoven. However, the work was issued a year later by the Bonn firm of Beethoven’s friend and admirer Nikolaus Simrock, whose ears were more receptive to the peculiarities of the score than Nägeli. And in the following year, 1811, Simrock once again stepped into the breach in the matter of the publication of the Six Violin Sonatas (J99–104). These were written to a tight deadline in the late summer of 1810, on commission from the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton André, who had in mind a collection of short pieces of moderate difficulty for the domestic music-making of the upper middle classes. Unhappy with the concomitant artistic limitations, Weber took the commission only half-heartedly and repeatedly complained during the compositional process of this ‘swine of a job’, which cost him ‘more sweat than the same number of symphonies’. His annoyance was all the greater when André rejected the finished work out of hand because it did not correspond to his expectations.
When Simrock finally published these pieces in Bonn in two instalments under the title ‘Progressive sonatas for fortepiano with obbligato violin, composed for and dedicated to amateur musicians’, with the opus number 10, Weber had only remotely followed André’s specifications. It is true that the technical demands on the performers, especially the violin, are fairly modest, but in terms of content the 6 short two- or three-movement sonatinas far outstrip mere pedagogical intentions.They were written to please amateurs, but quite as much to satisfy connoisseurs of any era.
Isabelle Faust follows up the success of recent recordings for hm [Bach volume 2, Berg and Beethoven with Claudio Abbado] with regular partner Alexander Melnikov and her brother Boris, currently principal viola of the Bremer Philharmoniker, and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt of whom Mstislav Rostropovich has said: ‘Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt is one of the leading cellists of his generation, of our time’.
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Isabelle Faust & Alexander Melnikov – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano & Violin, Vol. 3 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:03 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
By modifying the balance of the dialogue between the two protagonists, whom he turns into genuine alter egos, Mozart leads the genre of the sonata for fortepiano and violin onto the road to modernity. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present here the third volume of an exciting complete set on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour”, is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).
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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Brahms, Schumann & Dietrich: Violin Sonatas (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:49 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
A 19th-century ‘trio sonata’. Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov have already given us an acclaimed version Brahms’s First Violin Sonata, in 2007. They now complete the cycle with the other two sonatas of 1886 and 1888, and add a fascinating rarity dating from 35 years earlier: the ‘F-A-E’ Sonata, a collaborative effort by three composers in honour of the great violinist Joachim, who had to guess who had written which movement! He did so with ease, for the Scherzo is as eminently Brahmsian as the Intermezzo and Finale are Schumannesque. Alexander Melnikov will be contributing his take on a score his mother gave him that belonged to Sviatoslav Richter in September BBC Music Magazine.
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Alexander Melnikov – Hindemith: Sonatas for… (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:07 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Hindemith composed more than 30 sonatas for the most diverse instruments – all of which he was capable of playing himself! This fascinating selection of works written between 1935 (when he became persona non grata in Nazi Germany) and 1948 (the brilliant Cello Sonata for Piatigorsky) is played by some of today’s finest soloists, with the guiding spirit of Alexander Melnikov at the piano. How often does one hear a sonata for Althorn? Especially one published along with a poem by the composer?
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Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov, Freiburger Barockorchester & Pablo Heras-Casado – Beethoven: Triple Concerto, Op. 56 & Trio, Op. 36 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:18 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
After a successful trilogy devoted to the concertos and trios of Schumann, the team assembled alongside the Freiburger Barockorchester and Pablo Heras-Casado could not ignore one of Beethoven’s most unusual works: the Triple Concerto. They bring this score to life as only true chamber musicians can, revealing its subtlest colours and balances. The trio transcription of the Second Symphony, which was supervised by the composer himself, judiciously completes this exploration of lesser-known Beethoven, in which intimacy mingles with grandeur.
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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov, Jean-Guihen Queyras – Beethoven: Piano Trios Op 70 No 2, “Archduke” (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:32 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
By giving the stringed instruments the status of genuinely equal partners with the piano, it was Beethoven who gave the piano trio the form it was to retain throughout the 19th century. This album presents the composer’s last two works in the genre, Op.70 No.2 dedicated to Countess Marie Erdödy, and the celebrated ‘Archduke’ trio, which marked the final public appearance of its composer.
Three eminent Beethovenians, Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikov join forces here in performances that aim to highlight Beethoven’s humour in their interpretation and set a new benchmark in the process. Their next project will be Schumann Piano Trios to be recorded in May and released in 2015.
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven
Performer: Jean-Guihen Queyras, Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov
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Alexander Melnikov – Prokofiev: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1, 3 & 5, Visions fugitives (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:51 minutes | 777 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
In this third and final volume of his complete recording of the Prokofiev Sonatas, Alexander Melnikov explores two highly contrasted facets of the young prodigy. The dazzling Sonatas No. 1 and No. 3 sweep aside the codes of the period, unlike the more enigmatic and eminently subtle Sonata No. 5, heard here in the revised version Prokofiev made in the last years of his life. In the coupling, the Visions fugitives, the Russian pianist realises to perfection the mixture of brilliance and poetry that gives this cycle its peculiar charm.
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