Alexandre Kantorow, Piano
After his 2023 Carnegie Hall debut, Alexandre Kantorow was called “an exemplar of a new generation” by The New York Times, whose critic noted the “intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music making.” Tonight, the Gilmore Artist Award winner and International Tchaikovsky Competition Gold Medalist returns to even greater anticipation. His program features several rarely performed works: Medtner’s Romantic Piano Sonata in F Minor, Alkan’s haunting “The Song of the Madwoman on the Seashore,” and a significant set of variations written by Liszt on a theme by J. S. Bach. Well-loved piano works complete the program, including a Chopin prelude, Scriabin’s famously demanding Vers la flamme, and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32—the composer’s last work in the form.
Performers
Alexandre Kantorow, Piano
Program
LISZT Variations on the Theme "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen" (after J. S. Bach)
MEDTNER Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5
CHOPIN Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 45
ALKAN "La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer"
SCRIABIN Vers la flamme
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111
Encore:
LISZT Isoldes Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (after Wagner)
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.Explore More
At a Glance
LISZT Variations on the Theme “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (after J. S. Bach), S. 180
A seminal figure in the Romantic movement, Liszt was both a peerless virtuoso and a musical visionary. This monumental set of variations on a theme from one of J. S. Bach’s cantatas memorializes his deceased daughter.
MEDTNER Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5
Rachmaninoff may have been thinking of this work—the first of Medtner’s 14 fiendishly difficult piano sonatas—when he praised his lesser-known compatriot as a composer who had “from the beginning, published works that would be hard to equal in later life.”
CHOPIN Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 45
Chopin revolutionized keyboard writing in dozens of solo piano pieces that imbued the brilliance of the salon style with unprecedented poetic depth. The Op. 45 Prelude exemplifies the expanded expressive range of his later works.
ALKAN “La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer,” Op. 31, No. 8
Alkan’s early career as a celebrity virtuoso gave way to extended periods of creative isolation, during which he composed the hyper-virtuosic piano works on which his reputation rests. This short prelude anticipates the late piano music of his friend Liszt.
SCRIABIN Vers la flamme, Op. 72
Scriabin began his career as a Romantic composer-pianist in the Lisztian mold and ended as a proto-modernist. This miniature poème may have been conceived as part of an unfinished multimedia work titled Mysterium.
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111
Beethoven gave free rein to his poetic imagination in the radiant closing bars of his last piano sonata. In Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, the music teacher describes this passage as “the most moving, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world.”