CSOradio
CSOtv
CSOradio
Alexandre Kantorow achieved an extraordinary feat in 2019, when at the age of 22, he became the first French pianist to win the Tchaikovsky Competition and then was one of the few ever to win the contest’s Gold Medal (first prize) and Grand Prix simultaneously.
A few years later, he won another major prize, the Gilmore Artist Award. Trained mostly in his native France, he did not know much about the Gilmore Award until he unexpectedly won it in 2024. “It was a big surprise; they told me there was a jury following my concerts for four or five years [contestants are followed over a period of time] before they made a decision, it was a shock!" said Kantorow, who appears in an SCP Piano recital Feb. 2. "And it is unique the level of attention and support they provide.”
The prize is designed to nurture a young pianist’s early career and allow that person, thanks to generous funding, to choose his/her own path amid increasing engagements and recording opportunities. This is exactly what Kantorow seems intent on doing.
Kantorow’s concert appearances and initial recordings show a special affinity for composers who also figure in his SCP program: Brahms, Liszt, Bartók and Rachmaninov. Of Brahms, he has concentrated on the more youthful pieces, written when the composer was in his 20s. He likes the exuberance, the experimentation with form and unconventional harmonies that surprise anyone who hears the Ballades, Op. 10, or the three Piano Sonatas, and expects the restraint and elegance of the mature Brahms.
Some of these youthful qualities are still present in the Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79, No. 1, which is on the CSO program, but they are mixed with Brahms’ more classicizing instincts: “What’s interesting is that for Liszt and other Romantic composers, the rhapsody is supposed to be a fully free form, a work where you move like in an odyssey from island to island and where the various pieces are not related.
"Brahms wants to find the same freedom and poetry, but he also wants a more classical form. In his rhapsody, like in the sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, we return to the same themes; there is a narrative that informs the whole; there is a high point from which the piece moves away. It is an act of balancing for Brahms.”
Perhaps there is less experimentation in this Brahms, but the program still features plenty of that quality: for example, in Bartók’s Rhapsody, Op. 1, written when the Hungarian composer was 23: “This is really one of Bartok’s first works, and it is a grand, ambitious statement in free form, 20 minutes of music in which time is suspended.”
As for Rachmaninov, “although he was not so young when he wrote his Piano Sonata [No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 28], it was his first attempt at the idea of the sonata,“ he said. ”And he wants to build something monumental, like Liszt in his symphonic works, but for piano. The piece takes on epic dimensions and has a lot of complexity.”
Kantorow is always curious, he said, about lesser-known works that take on more risks: “What we call ’masterpieces’ are certainly much better crafted, but these works have many interesting moments of tension, and there is a lot of responsibility in performing them well.”
He rounds off his program with two pieces by Liszt, another of Kantorow’s composers of choice: the Transcendental Etude No. 12 in B Minor (Chasse-neige) and the Vallée d’Obermann from the Années de pèlerinage. “I love Liszt“ — Kantorow said — ”his music, but also his personality. He was always curious, always listening to other people’s music, he was traveling constantly. As a composer, he never stopped; he would go back to his older pieces and make new versions of them. At the end of his life, he became attracted to Christianity, and the music that came out of it.”
In the Vallée d’Obermann, Liszt finds in the piano something that “responds to and mimics ideas coming from painting, from literature,“ he said. ”The piano goes from darkness to light, using all the colors in between. Then there are these gushes of wind that sweep through the piece. When Liszt stopped being a pianist and became a composer, he started writing these amazing books on composition, which we can still read today. He wanted to dissect any new techniques and anything that the keyboard allowed him to do.”
The program ends with Brahms’ transcription for piano left hand of Bach’s Violin Chaconne in D Minor: “Differently from other Romantic transcriptions [for example, the Bach-Busoni transcriptions], Brahms intervenes only in small, subtle ways; for example, transposing the piece an octave lower to make it darker, almost like an organ piece.
"In a program full of dense and complex music, it is nice to arrive at a moment of true simplicity and very pure: just basic harmonies and variations on the same eight measures. It is a beautiful moment of quiet at the end of a big journey.”
