On the cover of his latest album, Alexander Kantrov's left arm is slumped behind a piano bench. The waves rise slowly from his hanging palms, rise up the straight lines of his bare forearms, crash around his shoulders, pass through his arched neck and deeply bowed head, and leave him with his right hand on the keys and washing dishes. Masu.
In this stunningly fluid photo taken by Fadi Kjaer during Kantrow's Carnegie Hall debut in 2023, he is first seen as a performer unusually relaxed in his flow. However, a second character is revealed in the image. A bohemian peeks out in her long hair cascading over the keys, one left sleeve pulled up, and a sliver of calf peeking out between her pants and boots. A little unkempt and probably not easy to tame.
Kantrow, 27, plays with a thunderous sound that has depth and clarity. And the classical music industry has taken notice, as his career has skyrocketed since winning the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019 and the Gilmore Artist Award in 2023. On January 24th, he will make his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Rachmaninoff's “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini''.
As the first French pianist to win a gold medal or Gilmore Award, he achieved some fame in his home country. Kantrov made an international splash last summer when he was seen performing Ravel's “Jeu d'eau” in the pouring rain at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, wearing a crystal-embellished shirt and a bushy beard. It attracted attention. (Following the performance, France Channel 3 described him as “heroic and unperturbed.”) In November, a critic for Le Monde reported that a group of fans outside a Kantorow performance at the Philharmonie in Paris were ” He was seen holding a placard that read “Place Cherche.” ” or “Looking for a seat.”
With his combination of youth, talent, competitive history and good looks, Kantrov looks like a strong player in a field that is always eager to create new stars. However, in sharp contrast to others his age, his promotion brought about little change in the way he did his day-to-day work. Although his number of international activities has increased and the team around him has grown correspondingly, he has remained with the same general manager and piano teacher since he was 16 years old. Rather than sign with a major label, he remained with Bis. , a small and dedicated Swedish label that became part of Apple-owned Platoon in 2023.
“I don't really like change or unnecessary changes in life,” Kantoroff said in an interview in Paris. Bis founder Robert von Bahr wrote in an email: “He protects relationships for the long term and refuses to change himself or his outlook. Few artists in his class do that.”
Cantlow's father, violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Cantlow, is grateful for his early entry into the music industry. He participated in the 2014 French Violin Sonata album. When Alexander was 17 years old, his father conducted an ambitious recording of both Liszt's concertos.
However, Aleksandr Kantrov's parents are concerned that he will fall in love with music by default, and his mother, Kathryn Dean, is also a violinist, so their son's overexposure will be a challenge. He was cautious. When Kantoroff was a toddler, his family moved to Paris from Clermont-Ferrand in central France. Unlike many other musicians he would later meet at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, he continued to attend non-professional schools for as long as possible. “Music is kind of a private family thing, and it has been for a long time,” he said.
This allowed Kantrov to develop a variety of interests, and may have led him to pursue science, particularly astrophysics. He has been regularly praised for his poetic performances. Inherent ambiguity comes primarily from the world of advanced mathematics, which is built on proofs and beliefs. “Of course, logical thinking is very present,” he said of astrophysics, but “a kind of faith and mysticism about the big questions of the universe: where we came from.” also exists.
Kantrow's early piano education focused on discipline. With Igor Lasko, he learned to enjoy detailed practice. When Kantrow was 12 years old, Lasko asked Kantrow flatly if he wanted to work seriously as a professional or remain an amateur. Even if he wasn't completely convinced, Kantrow, a professional, replied: “I think my ego kicked in,” he says.
If Lasko brought depth of focus, Lena Shereshevskaya, the respected Russian-French teacher who would later lead him to victory at the Tchaikovsky Competition, brought breadth of vision. In addition to working on the deep, long-lasting sounds that distinguish his sound today, they experimented with different methods to find deeper meaning in the scores.
“It was JS Bach who unified the musical language that existed before Bach and laid the foundations for the modern musical language,” Shereshevskaya said in an email. Her belief that all music comes from Bach and that by using and enriching this musical language all composers are connected through some kind of universal meaning is not accepted by modern musicologists. It may not be possible. But Kantloff still found the act of searching appealing. “All the students really feel motivated and inquisitive,” he says. “I feel like everything they do has meaning.”
Kantrov headed to Shereshevskaya with the Tchaikovsky Competition in mind. Their training plans were compared with those of athletes and were aimed at training Kantrov's subconscious mind. “For me, the best concerts are the moments when my brain is really regressing,” Kantoroff said. “Suddenly you disappear and you no longer exist.”
It paid off almost immediately. The first round of the Tchaikovsky Competition was “absolutely terrifying,” Kantrov recalls. “But even if the brain was completely useless, the body knew a lot of things to do, and among them was still music.”
A few weeks after Kantoroff's sold-out show at the Philharmonie, his fellow French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, a generation older, performed in the same hall with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He played on every song in the program. Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major. Solo piano part of Gershwin's “I Got Rhythm” Variations. and two ensemble pieces of ballet music: Milhaud's “La Création du Monde” and Bernstein's “Fancy Free.” The program was held eight times over nine days in four countries.
At this point, it's hard to imagine Kantrow being as stylistically flexible as Chamayou. He's taking his time. Andras Schiff once spoke of performing Bach's “Art of the Fugue” at the age of 70, but perhaps the greatest reward for a laureate like Kantrow is that he can't play part of it until he's completely ready. It would be a luxury not to be exposed to the repertoire of For example, Kantoroff doesn't feel comfortable playing Bach in public. “I feel like I need a general balance between my head and my heart, and I don't have this coordination right now,” he said.
Kantrov sometimes seems like a pianist from another era. “Oddly enough, I like that classical music is still a special experience, where there's nothing going on other than what you hear on stage,” he said. “Of course there is opera, but there is something special about a symphony, a recital, or a chamber music concert, when there is silence everywhere and you hear the music coming directly from the instrument, not through an amplifier. It's when only one sense is working.”
Previous Gilmore Prize winners have used their large awards ($300,000, with $250,000 set aside for career-enhancing projects) to support the creation of new work. With the exception of a recent concerto by Guillaume Connesson, Kantorow does not have much experience in contemporary music, but he is keen to explore it. When asked what kind of work attracted him, he replied: “I'm still a big believer in harmony. It doesn't have to be tonality, it's just the sense of grammar that we've developed over the years.” Talking about creating new music, Kantrov says: It gives the impression that he has finally started from an old work. He is currently fascinated by Brahms's early years and has just completed a study of Brahms's three piano sonatas while studying Piano Concerto No. 1. On one level, Kantloff can relate to what he calls “the element of brashness, the element of danger” and the element of youth in the bravado of the First Sonata. However, Kantoroff saw in No. 2 that Brahms wanted to “destroy the forms” and “progress in music”, and he would do that in the most direct way.
For Kantrow, such immediacy seems at odds with his rather artisanal outlook, based on tools, technique, and intuition. “The best interpretations are the ones that feel like you're starting from scratch, with little preconceived notions of how things will play out,” he said. “They have that intimacy with their bodies that adds something to the moment and achieves this level of risk.”
He's like a potter on a potter's wheel, using the same tools and a little talent to create the same beautiful things over and over again. “We just create the sound and shape it at the right time,” he said. The rest may follow.
