Alexandre Kantorow

Pianist Alexandre Kantorow, with two albums under his belt before reaching age 20, has played and recorded the music of Liszt, and he has the explosive quality the young Liszt himself must have had. Jerry Dubins of the U.S. magazine Fanfare even proclaimed Kantorow "Liszt reincarnated." The son of violinist-conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow, Alexandre was born on May 20, 1997, in Clermont-Ferrand in central France. He has been groomed for a career as a pianist for most of his life, studying with France's top teachers, including, first, Pierre-Alain Volondat. At the Schola Cantorum in Paris, his teacher was Igor Lazko, and along the way, he has also taken lessons with Jacques Rouvier, Théodore Paraschivesco, and Jean-Philippe Collard, among others. Enrolling at the Paris National Conservatoire, he continued his studies with Frank Braley and Haruko Ueda, then began working with Rena Shereshevskaya at École Normale de Musique. Kantorow made his debut at 16 with the Sinfonia Varsovia in Poland, performing Rachmaninov's fearsome Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and he made other early appearances with the Bordeaux Chamber Orchestra, the Orléans Symphony Orchestra, and the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra in Lithuania. He has won several top prizes in international competitions. Signed to the prestigious BIS label, Kantorow made his recording debut in 2015 with an album including Liszt's two piano concertos and the rarely played piano-and-strings concerto Malédiction, with the Tapiola Sinfonietta under his father's baton. He has rarely stepped into the role of his father's protégé, however. Kantorow's second album was a solo recital, À la russe, which won several awards. After that, BIS allowed Kantorow the freedom to choose what he wanted to record. His next recording was of piano concertos by Saint-Saëns, released in 2019, just prior to his appearance and win at the renowned Tchaikovsky Competition. He was the competition's first French victor. Kantorow established a pattern of touring widely while still a student, performing as far afield as Finland and South America despite the demands of classwork. He was featured in the first season at Paris' new Philharmonic Hall (Philharmonie de Paris), playing Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Op. 80. His interests extend beyond traditional repertory, and he has performed Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, in its original jazz band version, at French chamber music festivals. Kantorow has continued to record for BIS, issuing a recording of Brahms' Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, and Ballades, Op. 10, in 2021 and completing his Saint-Saëns concerto cycle the following year.
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