EGN NEWS DESK
On the duvet of his newest album, Alexandre Kantorow’s left arm falls again behind a piano bench. A wave builds slowly from his dangled palm, up by means of the straight line of his naked forearm, and crests round his shoulders earlier than breaking, down by means of his arched neck and deeply bowed head, leaving, within the wash, his proper hand on the keys.
In this strikingly fluid {photograph}, taken by Fadi Kheir throughout Kantorow’s Carnegie Hall debut in 2023, he seems first as an unusually relaxed performer in circulate. But the picture reveals a second character. In the lengthy hair draped messily over the keys, the one left sleeve rolled up, and the sliver of calf revealed between trouser and boot, a bohemian peeks by means of: barely unkempt and, maybe, not simple to tame.
Kantorow, 27, performs with a sound that roars, with depth and readability. And the classical music business has taken discover: After profitable the Gold Medal on the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019, and the Gilmore Artist Award in 2023, his profession has been on a speedy rise. On Jan. 24, he’ll make his debut on the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
As the primary French pianist to win both the Gold Medal or the Gilmore, he has earned a level of fame in his residence nation. Kantorow additionally gained worldwide discover final summer season, when he was seen with a crystal-embellished shirt and fuzzy beard, performing Ravel’s “Jeux d’Eau” within the pouring rain in the course of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. (After the efficiency, the France3 channel declared him “heroic and unflappable.”) In November, a reviewer for Le Monde reported that, exterior a Kantorow efficiency on the Philharmonie in Paris, a gaggle of followers stood holding indicators that learn “cherche place,” or “on the lookout for a seat.”
With his mixture of youth, expertise, competitors pedigree and appears, Kantorow appears a shoo-in for a area that’s at all times eager to anoint a brand new star. Yet, in a marked distinction to others his age, his rise has modified little about his on a regular basis working practices. His variety of worldwide engagements has elevated, and the workforce round him has grown to accommodate that, however he stays with the identical basic manager and piano teacher he has had since he was 16. Rather than signing with a significant label, he remained with Bis, the small, dedicated Swedish label that grew to become a part of the Apple-owned Platoon in 2023.
“I don’t actually like change, and pointless change in life,” Kantorow mentioned in an interview in Paris. Robert von Bahr, the founding father of Bis, wrote in an electronic mail: “He guards his relationships for the long term, and refuses to vary himself or his outlooks. Very few artists in his class do this.”
KANTOROW HAS HIS FATHER, the violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow, to thank for his early breaks within the music business. He accompanied him on a 2014 album of French violin sonatas. When Alexandre was 17, his father performed on his formidable recording of each Liszt concertos.
Alexandre Kantorow’s mother and father, nevertheless, have been involved that he would possibly fall into music by default — his mom, Kathryn Dean, can be a violinist — and so they have been cautious of overexposing their son. The household moved to Paris from Clermont-Ferrand, in central France, when Kantorow was an toddler. Unlike lots of the different musicians he would later encounter on the Schola Cantorum in Paris, he stayed in nonspecialist education for so long as attainable. “Music was a type of personal household factor,” he mentioned, “and it stayed so for a very long time.”
This allowed him to domesticate a spread of pursuits, and Kantorow would possibly effectively have pursued science, notably astrophysics. He has been frequently praised for his poetic performances; that important ambiguity comes principally from a world of superior math constructed on proofs and beliefs. “Of course, the logical thoughts could be very current,” he mentioned of astrophysics, however there’s additionally a “type of religion and mysticism concerning the massive questions of the universe — of the place we come from.”
Kantorow’s early piano training targeted on self-discipline. With Igor Lasko, he realized to benefit from the work of detailed observe. When Kantorow was 12, Lasko requested him firmly whether or not he wished to work critically as an expert or stay an newbie. Knowledgeable, Kantorow responded, even when he wasn’t completely satisfied. “I believe the ego kicked in,” he mentioned.
If Lasko introduced depth of focus, then Rena Shereshevskaya, the esteemed Russian-French teacher who would finally coach him to the Tchaikovsky Competition win, introduced a breadth of view. In addition to engaged on the deep-set, long-ringing sound that distinguishes his sound in the present day, they tried varied methods of discovering profound that means in rating.
“It was J.S. Bach who, synthesizing the musical language that existed earlier than him, created the idea of the fashionable musical language,” Shereshevskaya mentioned in an electronic mail. Her beliefs — that every thing in music stemmed from Bach, and that, through the use of and enriching this musical language, all composers are related by means of a type of common ur-meaning — could not sit effectively with modern-day musicologists. But Kantorow however discovered the act of looking enthralling. “All her college students actually really feel the motivation and the search,” he mentioned. “You really feel that what they’re doing at all times has that means behind it.”
Kantorow went to Shereshevskaya with the Tchaikovsky Competition in thoughts. Their coaching routine, which they in comparison with that of an athlete’s, was performed with a view to drilling Kantorow’s unconscious. “The greatest live shows for me are the moments the place your mind is sort of far again,” Kantorow mentioned. “Suddenly, you disappear, you don’t exist anymore.”
It paid off nearly instantly. The first spherical of the Tchaikovsky Competition was “completely terrifying,” Kantorow recalled. “But even when the mind was not serving to in any respect, the physique knew lots of issues to do. It nonetheless discovered music inside.”
A FEW WEEKS AFTER Kantorow’s sold-out efficiency on the Philharmonie, his fellow French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, who’s a technology older, carried out with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the identical corridor. He performed in every bit on this system: Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G; the solo piano half in Gershwin’s Variations on “I Got Rhythm”; and the ensemble elements in two ballet scores, Milhaud’s “La Création du Monde” and Bernstein’s “Fancy Free.” The program had been introduced eight occasions in 9 days, in 4 totally different international locations.
At the second, it’s troublesome to image Kantorow being as stylistically versatile as Chamayou. He’s taking his time. Andras Schiff as soon as spoke of taking part in Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” solely at age 70, and maybe the best reward for prize winners like Kantorow is the luxurious of not touching some repertoire till they’re completely prepared. Kantorow is, for instance, uncomfortable performing Bach in public. “I really feel it wants an entire stability with the top and coronary heart, this alignment which I, for now, don’t have,” he mentioned.
Kantorow generally looks as if a pianist from a distinct period. “In a bizarre means, I type of like that classical music remains to be a particular expertise the place there’s not a lot else happening apart from the sounds of what you hear onstage,” he mentioned. “Of course, there’s opera, however there’s one thing particular on the symphony, the recital or the chamber music live performance, when there’s silence all over the place — once you hear music that solely comes from devices straight, not with amplifiers. It’s one thing about when there’s very a lot just one sense working.”
Previous Gilmore winners have used its appreciable prize cash — $300,000, with $250,000 put aside for career-enhancing initiatives — to help the creation of latest work. Aside from a current concerto by Guillaume Connesson, Kantorow hasn’t had a lot expertise in modern music, however he’s dedicated to exploring it. Asked what sort of compositions he was interested in, he mentioned: “I nonetheless consider in concord very a lot. It doesn’t have to be tonality, extra a way of the grammar that we constructed with the ages.” In speaking about creating new music, Kantorow provides off the sense that he has barely began on the wealth of older works. He is at the moment fascinated by Brahms’s early interval, having simply accomplished a survey of his three piano sonatas whereas studying the First Piano Concerto. On one degree, Kantorow can establish with what he referred to as “the ingredient of brashness, of danger” and of youth within the bravura of the First Sonata. Yet, within the Second, Kantorow sees Brahms “destroying the shape,” wanting “to advance in music, and he’ll do it in essentially the most quick means.”
For Kantorow, that type of immediacy appears to run opposite to his quite artisanal outlook, constructed on instruments, craft and instinct. “The greatest interpretations are these which really feel like they’re ranging from scratch, with few preconceived concepts of the way it’s going to unfold,” he mentioned. “They add issues within the second, and so they have an intimacy with their physique to realize this degree of danger.”
He is sort of a potter on the wheel, utilizing the identical instruments and a contact of aptitude to make the identical lovely objects, repeatedly. “We simply craft sounds, and form them with the fitting timing,” he mentioned. The relaxation could comply with.
