It’s 27 July 2024 and for the second time in 24 hours Alexandre Kantorow is playing Ravel’s Jeux d’eau – but now without actual water. The night before, a global TV audience of tens of millions had watched him perform the piece at the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony, battered by near-apocalyptic rain. In the morning, he navigated the flooding to reach the Verbier Festival in the Swiss Alps, where his recital is leaving his audience in ecstasies. The Ravel is the obvious encore.
The young lion of the piano, now 27, winner of the Gold Medal, First Prize and the rarely awarded Grand Prix at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition, tends to wander on to the platform looking as if he has tumbled out of a catnap, hair aslant, clothes crumpled. Yet so volcanic, poetic and all-embracing are the sounds he draws from the instrument that Fanfare magazine has called him ‘Liszt reincarnated’.
It’s quite an image to
