The talented young pianist Alexandre Kantorow, described by Gramophone magazine as “a fire-breathing virtuoso with poetic charm” and by Fanfare as “Liszt reincarnated”, was born on 20 May 1997 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, into a family of Russian immigrants. His father is the violinist and conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow, a musician with a distinguished career; his mother was also a violinist. When the boy was 2 years old, the family moved to Paris. Alexandre began to study piano at the age of five at the conservatory of Pontoise, with Dominique Kim, in whose class he remained until the age of eight. For the next three years he studied at the Héctor Berlioz Conservatoire in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. At the age of 11 he began lessons with Pierre-Alain Volondat, winner of the 1983 Queen Elisabeth International Competition – Brussels. He continued his studies at the Schola Cantorum with Igor Lazko and then at the Paris Conservatoire with Frank Braley and Haruko Ueda. He is currently studying at the École Normale de Musique de Paris with and Rena Shereshevskaya.
In 2019 he received the First Prize, the Gold Medal and the Grand Prize at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.2 and Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.2. He is the first Frenchman to win the Tchaikovsky Competition in its entire history.
Alexandre Kantorow began active concert activity at an early age. At the age of 16 he was invited to the La Folle Journée Festival in Nantes and to Warsaw, where he played with the Sinfonia Varsovia Symphony Orchestra. Since then, the pianist has collaborated with many renowned orchestras, including: the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra (with Augustin Dumay), the Liege Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestras of Taiwan and Colombia and the Orchestre National de la Capitole de Toulouse. He became a member of prestigious festivals such as La Roque d’Antheron, the Chopin Festival in Paris and Piano aux Jacobins. At the age of 17 he played in the hall of the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra accompanied by the Padlou Orchestra , and at 18 he gave a solo concert in the building of the Louis Vuitton Foundation. He has performed on the stages of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Centre for Fine Arts BOZAR Brussels and others. In 2013 he recorded his first CD of rarely performed sonatas by French composers.
Bulgarian audiences enjoyed a performance by Alexandre Kantorow in 2016 at a concert in Bulgaria Hall, conducted by his father, Jean-Jacques Kantorow.