Alexander Melnikov - Johannes Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Scherzo Op. 4 (2011)

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Alexander Melnikov - Johannes Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Scherzo Op. 4 (2011)

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Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured.

Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new.

Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements. His admirably clipped and focused accounts of the sonatas’ comparatively brief scherzos are offset by a thrilling reading of the big stand-alone Op. 4 Scherzo, whose ‘demonic’ character is well brought out along with the structural daring of its developmental second trio.

Altogether Melnikov makes out a powerful case for the young Brahms as bold experimenter in sonata discourse. The ‘period’ piano sound may not be to everyone’s taste – in which case try for example Martin Jones (Nimbus), or Katchen or Richter (Decca) for the sonatas at any rate – but I greatly enjoyed these performances and warmly recommend the disc.

Review by Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine

The chief interest of this Brahms recital lies in Alexander Melnikov’s use of an 1875 Bösendorfer instrument, which he defends in his accompanying notes. There he charts the early domination of the American Steinway over the long-cherished Viennese Bösendorfer, with a neat sideswipe at America’s marketing strategies which “have not changed much in the last 150 years”. For him, his chosen instrument is notable for “the beauty and nobility of its sound”, though with the modest disclaimer that ultimate notions of “correctness” or authenticity are negated by changing cultural and aesthetic contexts. Certainly the sound, fascinating as it is, takes some getting used to, even when it does nothing to qualify one’s response to Melnikov’s ardent and magisterial performances.

These are of an all-Russian authority, with a thunder and intense virtuosity that often took me back to the playing of the young and titanic Gilels. The sonatas are programmed in reverse order since the Second was composed before the First, and with the early, volatile and Chopin-influenced B flat minor Scherzo in between. The F sharp minor Sonata blazes with the youthful genius that so astonished Robert and Clara Schumann, and with a fearless disregard for academic niceties, notably in the Scherzo’s bridge passage leading back to the principal idea and in the whole of the finale. And here Melnikov is every inch the klavier-tiger, taking every awkward difficulty by storm yet creating an unforgettable romantic glow in the coda of the C major Sonata’s Andante. The early Scherzo, too, is ignited with unfaltering mastery, making this an exceptional disc. Lovers of modern instruments will, however, return to Julius Katchen’s glamorous and swashbuckling Brahms on Decca, and look ahead to possible new recordings by Brahmsians of the stature of Nicholas Angelich and Jonathan Plowright.

Review by Bryce Morrison, Gramophone

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Alexander Melnikov - Johannes Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Scherzo Op. 4 (2011)

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Alexander Melnikov - Johannes Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Scherzo Op. 4 (2011)

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Alexander Melnikov - Johannes Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Scherzo Op. 4 (2011)

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