Alexandre Kantorow
French pianist Alexandre Kantorow, born in 1997, who caused a sensation by winning first prize at the 2019 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition, has a special fondness for Johannes Brahms' piano music. His first sonata in C major, whose beginning is so clearly linked to Beethoven's "Hammerklavier Sonata", is considered a dreaded challenge by pianists. The 20-year-old enchants with one of the most poetic slow movements in Brahms' oeuvre. Bartók's Rhapsody is also an emphatic Opus 1: the genius composer and highly virtuoso pianist Béla Bartók's self-conscious engagement with Liszt's adaptations of the music of Hungarian Roma bands.