Alexander Melnikov

Alexander Melnikov, born in 1973, is a Russian pianist who graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Lev Naumov. An early meeting with Sviatoslav Richter was among his formative experiences, and Richter went on to invite him regularly to his festivals in Russia and France. He was a prizewinner at the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau in 1989 and at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1991. Alongside the modern piano he has a long-standing interest in historical instruments and performance practice, shaped by his work with Andreas Staier and Alexei Lubimov, and he appears regularly with period-instrument orchestras. He is a devoted chamber musician, above all with the violinist Isabelle Faust and the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. His recording of the complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Faust won a Gramophone Award, and his set of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues received the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2011. He records mainly for Harmonia Mundi.