"Yet despite this sympathy for Brahms’s turbulence, the performance never seems excessive. Kantorow’s playing can be torrential but it’s never reckless; his sound can be full but his playing is often laced with delicacy; and because of his uncanny ability to balance inner lines, he manages to untangle Brahms’s thickest passages. Rhythmically, his profile can be sharp but he’s never inflexible (indeed, his rubato is often extreme), and he has plenty of lift.
That lift might remind you of what a fine Saint-Saëns player he is, incongruous as that seems. So, for that matter, might the quicksilver way he alternates between the ferocious and the mellow, between the extravagant and the meticulous with a dexterity that few other pianists can match – an ability to delineate praised by Jeremy Nicholas (6/19). To give but one example: note the way his leggiero interrupts the hammer blows with which he opens the Scherzo, a leggiero so graceful that it throws us off balance. It would be easy for such a performance to turn hectic, to deteriorate into a series of microbursts. But Kantorow has a superb grasp of dramatic shape, and the sonata ends with a true sense of culmination.
The same volatility marks the rest of his programme. From the terrifying crescendo that begins his reading of the Schubert-Liszt ‘Der Wanderer’ through the looming terror of ‘Die Stadt’ to the wild finale of the Wanderer Fantasy, this is electrifying playing. But here, too, the drama is heightened less by exaggeration than by contrast: ‘Frühlingsglaube’ is unusually gentle, and the Adagio of the Wanderer Fantasy starts with shell-shocked numbness."
