Everyone wants to book him right now: Alexandre Kantorow, the pianist born in 1997 who, seven years ago, became the first French winner of the Gold Medal at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition and received the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award in 2023. He has already performed with such world-class orchestras as the Berlin and New York Philharmonics and played Ravel’s Jeux d’eau in pouring rain at the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games — an artist who captivates audiences with the poetry of his interpretations. For his Lucerne Festival debut, Kantorow turns to one of his favorite composers: Johannes Brahms, whose First Piano Concerto seems almost written for eleven or twelve fingers, so formidable are its challenges. But Kantorow fears neither the massive chords nor the filigree passagework. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck then present a milestone of the Russian repertoire: Dmitri Shostakovich’s multilayered Fifth Symphony. With this work, written after being publicly denounced by Stalin’s “cultural guardians,” Shostakovich attempted to step out of the line of fire and wrote a bombastic, triumphal finale. But the real message can be heard between the lines.
