On Saturday, less than a week after the La Jolla Music Society presented Van Cliburn Competition winner Aristo Sham in recital at The Conrad, they hosted Tchaikovsky Competition winner Alexandre Kantorow in recital. In that same week, the San Diego Symphony presented Ingrid Fliter playing Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto and Alexandra Dovgan playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.
That is a lot of piano performance to experience in a week!
I am thankful that French pianist Alexandre Kantorow assembled a quite varied program of infrequently encountered repertory. He played two sonatas—Nikolai Medtner’s First Piano Sonata and Beethoven’s last sonata, his Opus 111—as well as lesser-known movements by Liszt, Chopin, Alkan and Scriabin.
A slightly younger contemporary of his fellow Russian composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, Medtner sounds in this Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5, comfortable with late Romantic harmonic practice. Although his themes frequently expand rhapsodically, he builds clear structures in this traditionally conceived four-movement sonata. The sonata’s outer movements are dauntingly virtuosic, and Kantorow soared through these complexities with elan.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111, has only two movements: a bravura showpiece “Allegro con brio e appassionato” followed by a serene “Arietta” theme and variation cycle. Kantorow confidently dispensed the impassioned first movement with its wild left-hand octave cascades, but his finest work in this program was his probing discernment of the noble sentiments of the “Arietta.”
Kantorow opened with Franz Liszt’s Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, S. 180. The composer took a sturdy, chromatic descending bass line from a movement of the J. S. Bach sacred cantata mentioned in Liszt’s title (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12), and built a formidable set of variations on it. In this piece, Kantorow displayed the breadth of his technique from his delicate treatment of its hushed, mystical chromatic sections to the muscular, rapid cross-hand pyrotechnics to which the variation cycle progresses. And for good measure, Liszt concludes this work with a highly ornamented four-voice Lutheran Chorale clothed in massive piano chords that—I imagine—are supposed to suggest a church organ with all the stops playing!
Kantorow gave a suave account of Chopin’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Opus 45, a more expansive prelude than is encountered in Chopin’s familiar Preludes, Op. 28, with examples of the form in all 24 keys. The recitalist followed his Chopin Prelude with a prelude by Charles-Valentin Alkan, a contemporary and close friend of Chopin. Curiously titled “Chanson de la folle au bord de mer” (“Madwoman’s Song at the Seashore’), it is an unusually quite, mysterious etude.
This recital was presented by the La Jolla Music Society at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla on April 25, 2026.