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Published: Wednesday, 08 January 2025 at 09:30 AM
Who is Alexandre Kantorow? The exciting young pianist described as ‘Liszt reincarnated’
Read on to discover all about exciting young French pianists Alexandre Kantorow…
Performing for millions at the Paris Olympics… in torrential rain
It’s 27 July 2024 and for the second time in 24 hours Alexandre Kantorow is playing Ravel’s Jeux d’eau – but now without actual water. The night before, a global TV audience of tens of millions had watched him perform the piece at the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony, battered by near-apocalyptic rain. In the morning, he navigated the flooding to reach the Verbier Festival in the Swiss Alps, where his recital is leaving his audience in ecstasies. The Ravel is the obvious encore.
Who is Alexandre Kantorow? The next Franz Liszt…
The young lion of the piano, now 27, winner of the Gold Medal, First Prize and the rarely awarded Grand Prix at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition, tends to wander on to the platform looking as if he has tumbled out of a catnap, hair aslant, clothes crumpled. Yet so volcanic, poetic and all-embracing are the sounds he draws from the instrument that Fanfare magazine has called him ‘Liszt reincarnated’.
It’s quite an image to live up to, but Kantorow, meeting me for a mountainside coffee the next day, simply laughs: ‘It’s a good catchphrase!’ Indeed, in certain respects Liszt is almost his role model. ‘What touches me is the fact that Liszt had one of the most curious minds I’ve ever heard of. He would change his ideas, he would try to find better technique, he would work on pianos, he could already imagine impressionism, atonality and tone poems for orchestra, and he would take music everywhere in Europe. This is the part of him that I hope I will have in my life so that it’s always constant food for the soul and for music.’
Alexandre Kantorow… an extravagant, Romantic, instinctive performer
Kantorow’s Verbier recital extended from Bach to Bartók, but his audience can’t help thinking of him as a Romantic. Is he one? ‘I don’t know,’ he muses, ‘but I love the feeling of having no plan when you start the performance. Even arriving with something that I’ve built in the rehearsals, many elements are instinctive. You’ve prepared and your hands won’t fail you. But the moment you start thinking too consciously in a concert, then you take shortcuts, and you can almost destroy a certain natural circuit of music. That can become challenging because you feel you are battling, or thinking twice about things that are so natural. More and more, I think this instinctive part of a concert is important.
‘There’s certainly a Romantic element in the fact that, maybe as in theatre, you take on emotions that you don’t experience in normal life. You suddenly bring into your body matters as extravagant as hell, heaven, the struggle of death and love, the immanence of things – all these feelings that through music are much easier to grasp than with words. They come into play at the moment of a concert and then go away when you come back to real life. Maybe that’s the Romantic part.’
Who are Kantorow’s musician parents?
Kantorow grew up in a family of musicians. His English mother is a violinist, and his father is the celebrated French violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow. ‘They treated music as such a normal part of life that it never struck me that it was unusual to have two musical parents, to hear classical music all the time and to hear my dad performing, giving recitals and always practising,’ Kantorow recounts. ‘I was in a normal school where I was nearly the only one doing classical music. My parents were more focused on how I did my homework.’
An early love of the piano and his first teachers
Unsurprisingly, he tried to learn the violin. ‘It didn’t suit me at all! But I started piano very young, and it felt much more natural. I loved the feeling of deciphering a score and finding it immediately on the keys of the piano.’ After his teacher Igor Lazko asked him, aged 11, if he was planning to get serious about the instrument, Kantorow replied that he was, ‘though I’m not sure I even knew at the time,’ he reflects. After that, he attended a music high school, surrounded by other musical youngsters, and there played his first concerto. It showed him something of what life would be like as a musician. ‘Then it clicked and I couldn’t go back.’
At the Paris Conservatoire he studied with Frank Braley, a former winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. ‘He was in his first year of teaching there and had a big performing career,’ he remembers. ‘I loved working with him. He didn’t treat the piano as an instrument, but as an orchestra.’
He also loved Parisian life, having grown up in the countryside near Clermont-Ferrand. ‘This was the first time I’d lived in Paris. Compared to other students who had lived there longer, knew everybody and had a global view of music, my view was very narrow. So, this was a time of expansion for me, a time for learning everything.’
Alexandre Kantorow… preparing for the Tchaikovsky Competition
An epiphany arrived when he heard Lucas Debargue play in the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition; the French pianist won fourth prize and the special prize of the Moscow Music Critics’ Association. ‘Everybody saw how special he was. He had started in music quite late, stopped, then went back to it much later, so he had much less experience than the other competitors. But he had a voice, a soul and a presence. I was curious about the teacher who brought him to that and I called her.’ She is Rena Shereshevskaya, a distinguished pedagogue who had studied with Lev Vlassenko at the Moscow Conservatory and settled in Paris in 1993.
Under her tutelage, Kantorow began to contemplate entering the Tchaikovsky Competition himself. ‘I had not done a major competition before,’ he says, ‘and I thought it would be like playing a concert… My teacher knew better!’ Shereshevskaya led him through an intense period of preparation that involved, he says, delving into the repertoire in enormous detail, and giving as many try-out performances of it as he possibly could. It was just as well: ‘The first round was one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve ever done.’
Through the contest, he and his fellow competitors scarcely looked up from their task. ‘We were in a bubble, just practising near the Conservatory, cut off from the rest of the world.’ When he heard he had won, he could scarcely believe it: ‘I think I blocked everything out!’ Only three artists had previously been awarded the Grand Prix: the pianist Daniil Trifonov and the singers Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar and Hibla Gerzmava. Kantorow is also the first French musician to win this competition.
Alexandre Kantorow… the weight of responsibility following his Tchaikovsky win
A roller-coaster existence ensued: he was immediately whisked off for a prize winners’ concert tour without going home. ‘At first, I think I was still high on the concerts and I didn’t have time to process it. A month later, when I had time off, I was able to think about what had happened – and there was an immense joy that my playing had touched people and that so many possibilities were opening up. At the same time, there was a tremendous weight of responsibility. I had to prove they had made the right choice.’ The critics were in little doubt, though: Diapason commented that Kantorow had ‘burst into the piano galaxy like a comet’.
Alexandre Kantorow… recording the Brahms sonatas
The Covid pandemic interfered, of course, but Kantorow treated it as ‘a time to reflect and to prepare a bit better for the future’. That was fortunate, because now the future is here and keeping him extremely busy. Last year he won, unexpectedly, the Gilmore Artist Award, for which winners are chosen in secret; it is worth a cool $300,000. His recordings (he now has an exclusive contract with BIS) have been lauded to the skies and a new one is just out: Brahms Sonata No. 1, Op. 1, and Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, plus six Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs.
It is part of an inspiring series: ‘I wanted to finish my set of the three Brahms sonatas, each of which came with a different programme. The sonatas are youthful pieces, written when Brahms was at his most experimental.
‘No. 1 is the closest to Schubert’s music and I think it has many connections with the “Wanderer” Fantasy. It is based on a similar rhythm; its heart is the slow movement, which like the Schubert unfolds as variations on a song; and the other movements use the same material. It seemed natural to put these two works together.’ Alongside them, Kantorow plays transcriptions of songs that reflect Schubert’s Wanderer, ‘who feels he is a stranger wherever he goes and is never at home, never at peace’.
Dealing with stress and exhaustion
I can’t help wondering if this ‘fire-breathing virtuoso’, as one review termed him, has strategies for survival in a life that also does not bring much peaceful time at home. ‘When you feel the stress, the more you try to make it go away, the less effective it is!’ Kantorow says, laughing. ‘But sometimes, if you feel a bit down and a bit tired, you just go on stage with this feeling. You don’t try and change it. And suddenly the music will carry you and open you up.’