This is some beautiful music I recently encountered, guys – Beethoven, Chopin & Liszt: Piano Works – performed by the talented young artist Alexei Melnikov. I don’t remember when was the last time I had such a toe-tapping experience with Beethoven’s music, but the fact is that this record brought the feeling back. It is simply stunning what Alexei achieves with the keyboard of the beautiful Shigeru Kawai EX grand piano.
The music simply breathes and flows, fresh as a mountain creek. I have listened to many different renditions of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, performed by quite a few well-known pianists, but I have never felt so emotionally involved with this music in such a joyful manner as with Melnikov’s organic and natural approach. Though only 27 years old, the Moscow-born pianist shows clear signs of the profound intellectual capacity that stands behind his ability to connect the listener with the music being performed.
When asked what he considers most important in musical performance, Alexei concludes:
My answer to this question will vary greatly depending on what you mean, whether you are talking about performing on stage or not. However, Schnabel said that he only needs one listener to perform Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
When performing in front of a large audience, one must select the appropriate language. The point of an appearance on stage is communication with the audience. Meanwhile, from a purely musical point of view… I am aware that music exists to express what words cannot, and I think the most important thing is to understand and convey the spirit embodied in the music.
Alexei Melnikov
My impression is that he truly succeeds in conveying the spirit of the music, and that is why I dare to bring this recording to your attention. But what makes this release outstanding is the addition of the wonderful acoustics of the recording venue at Campus Fichtenhain in Krefeld, Germany, and the magnificent tone of the Shigeru Kawai EX. The instrument combines the transparency and weight of a Bösendorfer with the mellow and harmonically rich timbre of a Steinway in a unique way.
There are dramatic moments of crescendo where one gets the impression that Melnikov is truly trying to destroy the keyboard, and it is simply astonishing to witness the instrument’s ability to convey these extremes of expression.
Ralf Koschnicke, the mastermind behind Acousence Records and the recording engineer of the project, has clearly done an outstanding job of capturing this abundance of nuance and dynamics. A set of Microtech Gefell and Neumann microphones was used to achieve a remarkably three-dimensional representation of the sound. The mix from the individual microphone signals was performed on a pure analog mixing console with fully symmetrical bus cabling and an audio bandwidth of around 750 kHz. The stereo mix created at the mixing console was then recorded at 24-bit/192 kHz resolution as the master, later used for generating the templates for the production of the audio media.
Highly recommended!