“It all started with the Second Concerto”: Alexandre Kantorow on Brahms

Johannes Brahms is a composer who has played a significant role in the career of the young French pianist, Alexandre Kantorow, and clearly has a place close to his heart. During the 2019 Tchaikovsky International Competition – at which he won not only First Prize in the Piano category but was also awarded the Grand Prix of the entire competition – he played Brahms’s Second Piano Sonata and the Rhapsody Op. 79 No. 1 in the Second Round, and in the concerto finale he chose the Second Piano Concerto which he paired, uniquely, with Tchaikovsky’s Second. Since then he has recorded the three piano sonatas, and the two concertos are part of his active repertoire.

“Actually it all started with the Second Concerto when I was very young,” he tells me when we meet in Amsterdam in the  middle of a short tour playing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto with the Netherlands Philharmonic and Lorenzo Viotti. “I was maybe 10 or 11 when I first heard it – I think it was the Rubinstein recording. And without realizing who Brahms was or what Brahms did, I was really struck by this idea of a huge journey where the piano was not separated from the orchestra, but was used really in communion with the orchestra.”

As a boy he found Greek mythology magical: “I used to love Ulysses, I used to love the Iliad. There was always this idea of a journey from place to place, and along the way you’d have these amazing encounters. And with this concerto it felt a bit like that. You passed through mountains and the vast beauty of nature, you went through darkness, you went through chamber music, you went in poetic moments, into folklore and dances, and all that becomes a coherent narrative. And that started my  love for Brahms.”

Alexandre comes from a family of musicians, and his father is the violinist (and often his conductor), Jean-Jacques Kantorow. “Then came chamber music when I was a bit older, because I could play Brahms’s violin sonatas with my father, and, soon after, the trios with friends at the Paris Conservatoire.”  Brahms’s gift to pianists is extensive, and is not only very broad, but also of the consistently highest quality – among the chamber music alone there are three violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, two clarinet sonatas, a horn trio, three piano trios, three piano quartets and the Piano Quintet. And of course there are the two great piano concertos and a wealth of magnificent solo piano and dozens of songs.    

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton on June 3, Alexandre Kantorow is joined by the violinist Daniel Lozakovich, a regular musical partner, and the cellist Gautier Capuçon for Brahms’s First Piano Trio (watch it here). “We played last year at the Vuitton – it was the only time we’d played together – and something special happened with the Tchaikovsky Trio. And at the time we all felt, let’s get together in a year, find new repertoire and play together again. The First Trio is interesting because Brahms normally doesn’t go back to his own pieces and rewrite them. But this one he really revised – and unusually we have both versions and it’s fascinating is to compare the two. The original material is so dense, and it is much longer. The three instruments are always playing together, so there’s never a moment where there’s not something happening – a melody, a countermelody, an idea, accompaniments and other things. But when he revisited it the density has been really trimmed down. It’s much more streamlined. It’s also a very rare occasion when a piece starts in the major and ends in the minor. Normally, where you would expect the joy with Brahms, it just goes into something else a bit gypsy, and it’s really dark.”

Brahms’s dedication to form and structure are well known. He was a true craftsman, in the best sense of the word. Kantorow agrees: “Yeah, I think he probably was very self-conscious about his work. We know that there’s a lot of things that he wrote that are not bad that he destroyed. I feel that most composers felt this pressure after Beethoven, and at this time the musical world was so divided – there was Liszt and Wagner and this progressive movement on one side and Brahms was attributed – without probably him having said a word – to the conservative camp. He took enormous care in every piece to ensure that there would be a logic behind everything. You feel so much knowledge and so much care in everything he wrote. There’s very little sense of pure improvisation without a huge amount of work behind it, to shape it into something that fits the structure as a whole. But sometimes something happens – and these are often the magic moments – when you suddenly feel that he just lets go the phrase for a few measures more, or suddenly he just invents a little melody that was had nothing to do with anything else, and just in the moment. But it’s very rare. Most of the time he shows this huge dedication to building blocks and little motives. It’s like a big tree where everything is firmly rooted in the ground and – no matter how long or how expansive or how emotional the music gets – there’s never a moment without a really strong bone structure.”

And what about Brahms’s writing for the piano? “Weirdly, it’s well written but it’s not at all natural,” Kantorow suggests. “I think Brahms’s piano ideas were not natural, and he could play them because he was a great pianist, but when you see the exercises that he wrote for the piano, they are not at all conventional. They are made to test – to the maximum – the independence of the two hands. He does things like juxtapose a rhythm in six in the right hand and one in five in the left! I think he did this because from the get-go he had the orchestra very much in mind. I don’t know if he had big hands, but he definitely wants huge, massive chords that are stretched out. He wants certain blocks to stay intact, and not sacrifice anything. So, yes, it can be a bit uncomfortable for a lot of technical reasons!”