I am fast running out of superlatives for this young man. Since listening to his recital streamed from an empty Philharmonie de Paris during the pandemic I have heard him play many times from Naples to Rome and London. I was even asked five years ago to name a pianist for the historic Amici della Musica in Padua and I had no hesitation in recommending Kantorow. ‘If you do not book him now you will never be able to afford him afterwards! ‘ How right I was as with every performance he commands our attention with his extraordinary musicianship and poetic involvement allied to a fearless technical command that seems to know no difficulties. There are no technical difficulties as such, when you are driven only with a burning desire to communicate what is on the printed page.
I will never forget the recital of two young lads in the Wigmore Hall. A violin recital with Daniel Lozakovich who was celebrating his 23rd birthday unknown to Kantorow, until one of the public shouted Happy Birthday from the hall at the end of their towering performances. Both appeared after the interval to play César Franck without the score such was their affinity and the freedom that they shared together .
A recital with a magnificent Matthias Goerner who has never had such an equal partner with whom to converse on stage.
A recital in San Carlo in Naples three years ago, before he was well known, with Brahms First Sonata that has never sounded so magnificent and never more justified the title of a ‘veiled symphony’ . Finishing with Volodos’s arrangement of Mozart’s Turkish March which Naples has never heard the like.
In Verbier we heard the same recital and encore – Wagner ‘Liebestod’ that he had played at the Wigmore Hall 125th Anniversary celebrations. A recital that is reviewed below .
In Verbier, though, he had included a fascinating work by Alkan, that was as prophetic as it was problematically repetitive. It was, though, the ideal link between Chopin’s extraordinary Prelude op 45 and the hysterical, hypnotic outpouring of Scriabin’s ‘Vers La Flamme.’ An incredible performance of Scriabin just as the Liszt Variations that opened the concert had been. I heard sounds that I have never heard from the piano before with playing of an earth shattering intensity that had me own the edge of my seat and worried for the health of an elderly audience not used to such a diabolical accumulation of X certificate sounds.
Tomorrow he closes the Verbier Festival with the work that won him the Tchaikovsky Competition – not the first concerto but the second. Hold on tight because this will be quite a ride!
I was asked the other day who was my favourite pianist . An impossible question but on thinking I did say that the only pianist I would travel a long distance to listen to is without doubt Alexandre Kantorow. As Schumann declared on the arrival of Chopin in Vienna :’ Hats off gentlemen, a genius!’ Or as a major Parisian critic wrote on the arrival of Horowitz in the ’30’s :’The greatest pianist alive or dead’.
As Rubinstein rightly said, in art there is no such thing as the best or number one …….but there are artists that very occasionally arrive on the scene who can illuminate scores that we thought we knew intimately . Today for me they are Alexandre Kantorow and Yunchan Lim both in Verbier this week as they were for the Wigmore Hall Celebrations . A hall that thanks to Artur Rubinstein is now in it’s 125 year and is going from strength to strength as in 1976 a 90 year old Rubinstein ,who had made his London debut there in 1912, had implored us to save the hall from demolition. Rubinstein that like everything he touched turned to gold.
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 