Alexandre Kantorow was born in Clermont-Ferrand on 20 May 1997 into a family of musicians: his father is the violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow, his mother the violinist Kathryn Dean. They were in no hurry to make a musician of him. He was kept in ordinary, non-specialist schooling for as long as possible, which left room for the astrophysics and the poetry he was also interested in, and the piano began almost incidentally — lessons from the age of five at the conservatory of Pontoise. At eleven he started work with Pierre-Alain Volondat, who had won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1983, and went on to Igor Lazko at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, then to Frank Braley and Haruko Ueda. The decisive teacher was the last: Rena Shereshevskaya at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, who also taught Lucas Debargue, and whose conviction that every later composer is connected through a musical language descending from Bach shaped how Kantorow assembles a programme. He was invited to play at La Folle Journee in Nantes at sixteen, and at seventeen appeared at the Philharmonie de Paris with the Orchestre Pasdeloup before an audience of about 2,500; the festivals followed — La Roque-d’Antheron, Piano aux Jacobins, the Festival Chopin a Paris — and then the international halls, the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Concertgebouw, BOZAR. In 2019 he won first prize, the gold medal and the Grand Prix at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the first French pianist to win it in the competition’s history; he was the only finalist to play Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto, and also performed Brahms’s Second. The Gilmore Artist Award followed in 2023, worth 0,000 and given not by competition but by unannounced observation, so that the news reached him with no warning at all. On 26 July 2024 he played Ravel’s Jeux d’eau in pouring rain at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. He was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Merite in 2024, having earlier been made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has recorded for the Swedish label BIS since 2014, and stayed with it rather than move to a major.

Kantorow arrived with a reputation for sheer force — Gramophone’s “fire-breathing virtuoso with a poetic charm”, Fanfare’s “Liszt reincarnated” — and has spent the years since complicating it. The Tchaikovsky gold medal in 2019 mattered beyond his own career: no French pianist had ever won that competition, and he took it with the Second Concerto, the one almost nobody chooses. The Gilmore Artist Award in 2023 was the confirming judgement of a different kind, since it is awarded by watching a musician for years without telling them, and holding both prizes was read in the American press as evidence of technical security joined to something worth saying. The discography is where the argument is actually made. He records for BIS, a small Swedish label he has stayed with when a major would plainly have taken him, and has built it deliberately: the Liszt and Saint-Saens concerto records made with his father conducting, the Russian recital A la russe, and then a Brahms sequence whose final instalment took Gramophone’s Piano Award for 2025. That last programme is characteristic of how he thinks. It sets Brahms’s First Sonata beside Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and puts five Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs between them, so the transcriptions work as the hinge of the record rather than as encores. The Olympic Jeux d’eau, played in the rain to a global television audience in 2024, briefly made him the most widely watched classical pianist alive — an unlikely sort of fame for a musician who is uneasy about playing Bach in public and who has kept the same manager and the same teacher since he was sixteen. It has not changed what he records or where.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Kantorow
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64852933
• https://web.archive.org/web/20251015223734id_/https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/gramophone-s-piano-award-2025-brahms-and-schubert-from-alexandre-kantorow
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kBPXpz5y_Ih_tmZQuZTeXOumuGnxTPXVw