French pianist Alexandre Kantorow shares a conversation with Cara Lieurance, fresh off an eight-city American tour and preparing for two back-to-back performances at Chenery Auditorium as part of the 2026 Gilmore Piano Festival.
Kantorow speaks warmly about returning to Kalamazoo, describing the community that has grown around the festival. "You feel really there's a community here," he says. "You really see familiar faces and you get the highest quality of music making, but with this sort of warm sense of welcome and just belonging."
The first of his two performances features Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra under conductor Julian Kuerti. Kantorow describes the piece as unusual and deeply personal, noting that the sprawling first movement is dominated by extended cadenzas while the second movement hands the spotlight almost entirely to the violin and cello. "You really feel the scale is huge," he says. "It's music that feels deeply personal to Tchaikovsky." He last performed the concerto two months ago with the London Philharmonic after not playing it for years, and reflects that revisiting a work reveals fresh interpretive layers — "you add a layer of paint on top of it."
The second night brings a solo recital anchored by a program that began, Kantorow explains, with his love for the lesser-known Russian composer Nikolai Medtner. The evening also features Bach transcribed by Liszt, Beethoven's final piano sonata, and a Chopin prelude — all chosen for their shared themes of obsession and transformation. Another highlight is the U.S. premiere of Kalamazoo Flow, a solo piano work by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg commissioned with the support of the Gilmore Artist Award. Kantorow describes consulting with Hillborg during the composition process, noting the composer's unusual openness: "He really wanted the artists who play his music to first of all really make it his own." The piece evolves from impressionistic textures to a toccata-like finale built on a single blues-jazz chord, an energy Kantorow calls "so fun to play."
Kantorow also reveals he is currently reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a book his grandmother sent him at 14 that took a decade to crack open. Tickets and details for both performances are available at thegilmore.org.
