The UK’s renowned Gramophone Classical Music Awards announced that their Piano Award 2025 was bestowed on Alexandre Kantorow for his 2023 recording Brahms & Schubert (BIS).

Since he became the first French pianist to win the Gold Medal at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition, along with the rarely awarded Grand Prix, Alexandre Kantorow has fascinated the world at his own pace but on unstoppable momentum.

The winning recording features Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 1, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and Schubert’s songs arranged for piano by Liszt, which have been regularly performed by Kantorow at his highly-praised recitals all over the world as his core repertoire. Indeed, he played them during his 2023 Japanese tour to critical acclaim.

Gramophone praises the pianist writing that this album “further consolidates Kantorow’s standing among the leading pianists of his generation,” adding that (excerpts):

Brahms’s First Sonata distils the competing aesthetics of the mid-19th century and Kantorow responds to these intuitively. Hence the inherent rigour and lucidity of its initial Allegro finds as potent a contrast in the Andante’s ruminative variations on a Medieval folksong as does this latter in the Scherzo’s alternate panache and elegance, with the stealthily evolving final rondo conferring a formal focus on the whole prior to its decisive closing bars.
* * *
[In Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy] Kantorow slightly reins in its extrovert initial Allegro as to emphasise the pathos of its Adagio then the impetus of its Presto sections. Nor is there any lack of resolve in a final Allegro that sees this sequence through to its scintillating close.
(text by Richard Whitehouse)

The entire article:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/gramophone-s-piano-award-2025-brahms-and-schubert-from-alexandre-kantorow

Album Details:
Alexandre Kantorow – Brahms & Schubert
https://bisrecords.lnk.to/2660

Brahms – Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 1
Schubert – ‘Wanderer Fantasy’, D 760
Schubert / Liszt – 5 Song Transcriptions
BIS Records / Recorded in 2023

In November this year, Kantorow will be the soloist for the Japanese tour of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Klaus Mäkelä, performing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
https://www.kajimotomusic.com/eng/concerts/2025-rco/

Keep an eye out for more from Alexandre Kantorow in the future!