And it is not absolutely necessary to play the romantic and late-romantic piano concertos of Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev to achieve this. It is enough to turn to the Preludes and Fugues op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich (who, like Rachmaninov and Prokofiev himself, was an excellent pianist), the cycle with which Shostakovich created a musical monument to his greatest role model, Johann Sebastian Bach. Listening to Melnikov play these pieces, one experiences the great and rare fortune of understanding the works from the inside out, as it were; their contrapuntal logic, their semantics, their musical gesture. However, Melnikov is by no means a didactician imparting his wisdom to the audience; it is the musical messages themselves that he conveys and thus steps out of the centre of the action; it is not the interpreter who speaks here, but the music.