Alexander Melnikov has already made a number of recordings of chamber music using historic pianos – Beethoven piano trios on an instrument made by Alois Graff in the 1820s, Schumann on a Streicher of 20 years later – and his latest disc extends those explorations into the solo repertoire, with a different piano for each of the four works he plays. So we hear the Wanderer Fantasy played on that same, beautifully restored Graff, made in Vienna around the time of Schubert’s death and now part of Melnikov’s own collection, while he uses an 1837 Érard for Chopin’s Op 10 Studies and an 1875 Bösendorfer for Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, before opting for a modern Steinway for the Three Movements from Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
Melnikov played the same programme at the Wigmore Hall in London earlier in the month, though using three different pianos rather than the four here, and the results on disc seem more convincing – less cluttered and congested – than they were in the concert hall. He makes good use of the tonal differences between registers on the Graff in the Wanderer Fantasy and exploits the light touch of the Érard to brilliant effect in the more bravura Chopin studies, while the Bösendorfer (missing from the London recital) produces a leaner sound than the maker’s later instruments. It’s odd that Melnikov uses a Steinway for his dashing performance of the Stravinsky; surely in this context a French piano from the beginning of the 20th century – a Pleyel, say – would have been more appropriate? Even with that opportunity missed, though, this is still a really rewarding disc that’s well worth investigating.
Also out this week
Kristian Bezuidenhout is another keyboard player who seems to delight in the creative possibilities of instruments from different epochs. He features on two of this month’s other releases from Harmonia Mundi, playing a copy of an 18th-century harpsichord for Isabelle Faust’s typically probing and intelligent accounts of Bach’s Violin Sonatas, six works with keyboard that are much less well known than the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and using a Conrad Graf fortepiano from the 1820s to accompany Mark Padmore’s account of Schubert’s Winterreise. There’s no doubt the expressiveness Bezuidenhout obtains from the light-toned instrument matches Padmore’s lyrical, delicate approach very well, but there remains something remote and detached about the performance, though the sound of the recording may have something to do with that, with the voice placed well back in a rather echoey, almost bathroom-like acoustic.
