Alexandre Kantorow: Liszt Reincarnated, Reluctantly
On 26 July 2024, in torrential rain, a twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman played Ravel's *Jeux d'eau* at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics — water music, performed in a downpour, in front of a global television audience. His performance was described as heroic and unflappable. Five years earlier he had done something rarer still: become the first French pianist ever to win the International Tchaikovsky Competition, and the only competitor that year to reach the final with Tchaikovsky's neglected Second Concerto rather than the famous First.
The Musician's Son Who Was Not Pushed
Kantorow was born on 20 May 1997 in Clermont-Ferrand. Both his parents are string players — his father is the violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow, his mother the violinist Kathryn Dean — and the notable thing about his upbringing is how little they did with that advantage. They were initially reluctant to teach him music at all, and he pursued a nonspecialist education rather than the conservatory hothouse that would have been the obvious route. His early enthusiasms included astrophysics and writing poetry.
He nevertheless began piano at five at the Pontoise conservatory. At eleven he started working with Pierre-Alain Volondat, who had won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1983. He went on to study with Igor Lazko at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, with Frank Braley and Haruko Ueda, and with Rena Shereshevskaya at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He has kept the same teacher and the same manager since he was sixteen — an unusual constancy in a business that encourages musicians to trade upward.
Early Platforms
The career started before the competition did. At sixteen, in 2013, he was invited to perform at the La Folle Journée festival in Nantes. At seventeen, in 2014, he appeared in the inaugural season of the Philharmonie de Paris with the Pasdeloup Orchestra. Engagements followed at the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, BOZAR in Brussels and the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
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The Sixteenth International Tchaikovsky Competition gave Kantorow first prize, the gold medal, and the Grand Prix — the overall award across all disciplines. No French pianist had won the piano category in the competition's history.
The programming decision that got him there deserves attention. He was the sole finalist to perform Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto in G major, a sprawling and comparatively unloved work, alongside Brahms's Second Concerto in B-flat major. Both are enormous; neither is the crowd-pleasing choice. In a contest where the strategic move is to play the piece the jury has heard a thousand times and play it flawlessly, he took the opposite bet.
The Recordings
Kantorow records for BIS, the Swedish label acquired by Apple-owned Platoon in 2023 — a smaller and more idiosyncratic home than the majors that typically absorb competition winners. His catalogue began in 2014 with *Sonates françaises*, made with his father on violin. It has moved through Liszt's piano concertos and *Malédiction* (2015), the Russian programme *À la russe* (2017), Saint-Saëns's Third, Fourth and Fifth Concertos (2019) and the First and Second (2022), a Brahms-Bartók-Liszt recital (2020), Brahms's Third Sonata (2021), the *Brahms • Schubert* album (2024), and *Momentum 2: Korngold, Strauss* with the violinist Liya Petrova (2025).
Honours
In 2023 he received the Gilmore Artist Award, worth $300,000 — one of the largest prizes in music, and one that arrives without a competition attached. His reaction was characteristically deflating: "It was a bit like a 'You're a wizard, Harry,' kind of moment."
France made him a Chevalier of the National Order of Merit and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2024. In 2025 the *Brahms • Schubert* album took Gramophone's Piano Award.
Why Alexandre Is Called a Genius
The word critics reach for is not intelligence but incarnation. Fanfare magazine called him "Liszt reincarnated." Gramophone described a "fire-breathing virtuoso with a poetic charm," and Hugh Morris, writing in the New York Times, called him "a pianist from a different era."
What these responses are registering is a specific and unusual combination: enormous sound and technical abandon coexisting with restraint, so that the fire-breathing does not consume the phrasing. The Moscow final is the hard evidence. Choosing Tchaikovsky's Second alongside Brahms's Second is a repertoire judgement, not a feat of fingers — it required knowing that his particular strengths would show better in unfamiliar territory than in a piece the jury could compare to a hundred previous performances. That is interpretive intelligence, and it was vindicated by the Grand Prix.
The counter-case is that nobody quoted has actually used the word genius, and the phrases that circulate are period costume rather than assessment: "Liszt reincarnated" flatters by comparison instead of describing. And Kantorow's gift is, at bottom, a performer's craft — the physical management of an instrument in works written by other people, requiring extraordinary coordination, stamina and tonal control, but not invention. He appears to know this. The Harry Potter joke about the Gilmore is the response of someone who finds the mythology around him faintly absurd, and his refusal to leave the teacher he found at sixteen suggests a man who believes his playing is made by work rather than by nature.
Legacy
Kantorow's significance to French music is partly national bookkeeping — a country with an immense pianistic tradition had never won in Moscow until he did. But the more durable thing may be the shape of his career: a musician who came up outside the conservatory pipeline, who stayed with a small label and a small team, and who won the two most lucrative recognitions available to a pianist without ever appearing to want the persona that comes with them. Whether the Olympic rain or the Moscow gold turns out to be the defining image, he has already proved that the old Romantic model of the pianist can be revived by someone who is faintly embarrassed by it.
