Home listening - one Érard, one Fazioli and 60 years of Harmonia Mundi

The Guardian 0

Alexander Melnikov cooks up a Debussy storm, while Vadym Kholodenko charts an inspired path through Scriabin

• Hats off to Harmonia Mundi: this indispensable label, a pioneer of unusual repertory and period-style performance, has been celebrating its 60th anniversary with a big retrospective. But it has also carried on with new and striking releases, including two outstanding piano discs.

Alexander Melnikov plays Book 2 of Debussy’s Préludes on an Érard piano of around 1885. While this matching of music to instrument has been tried before, it’s particularly successful here thanks to the maturity and insight of Melnikov’s playing. What the Érard gives you is a crisp, transparent register for each part of the keyboard: blend is not the aim, but rather a distinctive set of flavours so that Debussy’s inspirations, by turns whimsical, witty, imaginative and passionate, each have their own colour. The composer deliberately underplayed the programmatic aspects of the music by giving each Prelude just a tempo marking, and then adding a title only at the end of the piece – surely a unique gambit.