Alexander Melnikov’s five-year traversal of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas concludes with the third volume of a survey that has compelled attention for its granitic poetry and formidable playing from the off.

As before, as Warwick Arnold approvingly noted in his review of Volume 1 for Limelight, Melnikov “keeps microscopic detail, large periodic rhythms and architectural detail in such perfect equilibrium that the whole is deeply satisfying”.

Those qualities are most notable in the ‘filler’ here: the early collection of 20 atomised miniatures, Visions Fugitives; the shortest, the work’s flighty fulcrum, Molto giocoso, a mere 23 seconds, the longest, the simultaneously lowering and lyrical two-minute Lento irrealmente finale. Composed shortly before the Third Sonata and inspired by lines from the Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont – “In each fleeting vision I see worlds, full of the changing play of rainbows” – it’s a curiously satisfying fusion of Chopin and Scriabin with deftly insinuated dashes of Webern.

It is also prime Prokofiev, prim lyricism nestling alongside the grotesque, violence and caustic wit...