Fantasie: Seven Composers, Seven Keyboards

Chronique

For keyboard geeks, this album is essential. Pianist Alexander Melnikov showcases a variety of keyboard instruments, many of them his own possessions, from a copy of a mighty double-manual 17th century Ruckers harpsichord in the Bach Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903, to a modern Steinway in the slam-bang finale, the Improvisation and Fugue, Op. 38, of Alfred Schnittke. Several of the instruments are quite unusual. Hear the haunting tangent piano in the Fantasia in F sharp minor, H. 300, Wq 67, of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, or the 1828 Viennese Graf piano on Mendelssohn's Fantasia in F sharp minor, Op. 28; historically oriented performances of Mendelssohn are not common. Yet the album has a second programming strand, and it is one of general interest beyond keyboard circles. The fantasia (German: Fantasie, French: fantaisie) is unique in that it is unchanged in its essentials since the Renaissance, and it is fascinating to hear those essentials as the march of styles unfolds against them. Harmonia Mundi contributes splendidly detailed sound from Berlin's Teldex Studio in a recording of great general interest that made classical best-seller lists in the spring of 2023.
© James Manheim /TiVo