Alexander Melnikov graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. His most formative musical experiences included early encounters with Sviatoslav Richter. He developed an intense and lasting interest in historically informed performance practice early on. His major influences in this field include Andreas Staier and Alexei Lubimov. He regularly performs with well-known ensembles including the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the B’Rock Orchestra and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.
As a soloist, he has performed with prestigious orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Utopia and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2021 he has appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival.
In 2025/26 his appearances included performances with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under Tabita Berglund, the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Natalia Ponomarchuk, the Oslo Philharmonic under Maxim Emelyanychev, the Orchestre de chambre de Paris and the Finnish Baroque Orchestra. He also presented works by the forgotten composer Emilie Mayer with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and gave recitals with Julia Lezhneva at the Cologne Philharmonie and the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. Other engagements included tours to Asia.
He has continued his intense chamber music activity with collaborators including Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras, the Belcea Quartet, Cuarteto Casals and the Quatuor Danel.
His discography reflects his musical curiosity. His disc of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues op. 87 was listed by BBC Music Magazine as one of the 50 most important recordings of all time, and his album Fantasia features seven works recorded on seven different instruments. He has recorded the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Isabelle Faust for harmonia mundi (Gramophone Classical Music Award, Grammy Award nomination). They have also recorded the complete sonatas for violin and piano by Brahms (2015) and by Mozart (2018 and 2021). In 2025 he and Julia Lezhneva released Visiting Rachmaninoff, recorded at the composer’s home Villa Senar, in which he accompanies the soprano on Rachmaninoff’s original grand piano.
Alexander Melnikov is a prize-winner of major competitions, among them the Robert Schumann International Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Competition.
