Alexandre Kantorow

Where Is Home? 

Coming home in music

A man steps onto the stage, cello in hand. He looks out into the concert hall, spreads his arms and says, ‘Welcome. Tonight, you are not listeners, but participants. Our meeting is an exchange.’ Then he begins to sing and play, and everything becomes clear. He absorbs the audience’s energy like a human antenna and returns it tenfold. The concert hall shifts into an intimate living room. Everyone who witnessed it walks away transformed. 

This is essentially how a concert by Abel Selaocoe unfolds. Together with this charismatic cellist, singer and composer, we warmly welcome you to the 21st Klarafestival. As a festival artist, Selaocoe will play three concerts spanning the full spectrum of his musical world. From traditional music from his native South Africa to baroque, jazz, contemporary classical and improvisation: he melds all these influences into a unique body of work, centred on identity and cultural exchange.

The theme of this year's festival is taken from the debut album of Selaocoe’s own Bantu Ensemble: Where Is Home? It is an open question with endless answers – especially in the super-diverse city of Brussels, home to 180 nationalities and 100 languages. Our capital is a crossroads, a refuge, a temporary or permanent home for countless individuals, each carrying their own story. Every day, we feel privileged that our festival can take root in such fertile soil.

Klarafestival 2026 is an ode to the city we call home. During Muziekberg/Mont des Musiques, Brussels musicians will take over the Kunstberg (Mont des Arts) for a day, from the Musical Instruments Museum to Bozar, from the Ravenstein Gallery to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. And both Radio Lomax and the choir Les Invisibles (La Voix des Femmes Sans Papiers) will perform Brussels songs with diverse roots. 

Our mission is to show as wide an audience as possible that classical music is alive and kicking. Even the most familiar works take on fresh life in the hands of the adventurous musicians we surround ourselves with. Prepare to be captivated by Bach's St John Passion as conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. Marvel at Beethoven and Strauss with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. Rediscover Chopin and Scriabin in a performance by Alexandre Kantorow. Or encounter keyboard phenomenon Anthony Romaniuk: like Abel Selaocoe, he intertwines his own compositions with the established repertoire, from Bach to Björk.  

This festival programme features many more musical kindred spirits. Annelies Van Parys completed the 8th symphony of her former teacher Luc Brewaeys. Pianists Kris Defoort and Stephane Ginsburgh pay tribute to their friend Philippe Boesmans, who would have turned 90 in 2026. Abel Selaocoe, in turn, improvises with like-minded souls, both old and new, and performs a brand-new cello concerto by American composer Jessie Montgomery. 

None of this would be possible without the support of our partners in Brussels and beyond. Bozar, Flagey, De Munt, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels Philharmonic, Belgian National Orchestra, Passa Porta, BNA-BBOT and the Luc Brewaeys Foundation all contribute to Klarafestival’s unique DNA. Our indispensable private partners include KPMG Belgium, Proximus, Brugse Zot, Gimv/WorxInvest and Interparking. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community, the Flemish Community Commission, the Brussels-Capital Region and the National Lottery. Our collaboration with VRT and Klara, meanwhile, is the secret to our success as a broadcasting festival. Above all, we thank our enthusiastic audience who follow us both in the concert hall and at home on the radio and VRT MAX. 

For Abel Selaocoe, ‘home’ is much more than a building or a place. 'It can be a spiritual space. It can be people. (...) It can be something you find along your travels.’ For seven years, Klarafestival has been ‘home’ for festival director Joost Fonteyne. His sense of adventure and social connection is more evident than ever in this festival programme. In April 2026, he will continue his journey and pass the torch to Jan Van den Borre. Many thanks, Joost, for the wonderful years!

The Klarafestival Team

Joost Fonteyne, intendant
Jan Raes, chairman
Chantal Pattyn, network manager

With Keys to the Soul, Alexandre Kantorow invites the audience into an inner journey. He offers a recital that is not a mere succession of masterpieces, instead tracing a carefully crafted trajectory through grief and consolation, inner struggle and transcendence, ecstasy and stillness.

A passacaglia of sorrow and reconciliation
Kantorow opens his recital with one of Liszt’s most personal works. The Variationen, S.180, are based on the chromatic basso ostinato from the cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (BWV 12) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Although Liszt himself refers to them as ‘variations’, the form more closely follows the passacaglia tradition: an obsessively repeated bass pattern that pervades the entire piece, creating an inescapable gravity.

Liszt composed this piece shortly after the death of his daughter Blandine in 1862, only three years after his son Daniel passed away. The music breathes a profound, inward grief. Only in the conclusion does Liszt open the path to reconciliation. The shift to the key of F major and the quotation of the chorale Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan yield no triumph, but merely a subdued, resigned consolation.

A young Russian master speaks
Russian composer Nikolai Medtner was just twenty-three when he completed his First Piano Sonata in 1903. Yet, in this sonata he already reveals himself as a mature pianist-composer, firmly rooted in the German classical tradition, while asserting a distinctly personal voice. The influences of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt resonate, yet the work remains unmistakably Medtner.

The four-movement sonata unfolds as a psychological drama in which the soul becomes the battlefield: thinking, searching, hesitating. The restless first movement shows a strong affinity with Bach’s polyphonic writing, woven by Medtner into a typically Russian tapestry of melancholy and lyricism. The music seeks feverishly for stability, yet offers no genuine release. The subsequent Intermezzo suggests a sense of repose but remains threatening beneath the surface. The heart of the sonata is the Largo divoto: a restrained, almost religious meditation in which doubt and hope alternate. The finale, Allegro risoluto, drives this tension to an impassioned climax.

Dreamlike sonority
Chopin’s Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 45, offers a moment of introspective stillness. In contrast to the brief, aphoristic preludes of his opus 28, this piece unfolds as a written improvisation. Chopin delights in the gradual interweaving of melody and accompaniment. Of particular note is the highly chromatic cadenza just before the conclusion. This passage sounds like a moment of free imagination, after which the opening material returns in a softened guise.

Inner drama by the sea
La Chanson de la folle au bord de la mer, from the 25 Préludes, Op. 31 by Charles-Valentin Alkan, adds a pronounced programmatic dimension to the recital. In this short yet intense miniature, Alkan depicts the mental instability and inner turmoil of a woman by the sea. Musically, this is rendered through stark contrasts of register: an ethereal, fragile melody in the upper register against a heavy, menacing bass that evokes the inexorable movement of the sea. The use of pedal and resonance lends the piano an almost orchestral depth, creating a hypnotic sonic tableau.

Flames of transcendence
Vers la flamme is among the final works of Alexander Scriabin and embodies the visionary style of the forty-two-year-old Russian composer. Less than a year later, he unexpectedly died of blood poisoning. This brief poème is imbued with the theosophical ideas of ecstasy as a creative force that shaped Scriabin’s thinking during this period: ‘In the form of thought, ecstasy is the highest form of synthesis; in the form of feeling, ecstasy is the greatest joy; in the form of space, ecstasy is bloom and destruction.’ Scriabin translates this vision – drawn from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche – into music through an inexorable motion towards a point of ignition. Trills, tremolos, and rapid figurations render the sound increasingly unstable, as if the matter itself were beginning to melt. For Scriabin, fire symbolizes transformation: destruction and rebirth in a single gesture. In the context of this recital, Vers la flamme serves as a moment of radical unbounding, in which the soul threatens to lose its form.

The ultimate sonata
Beethoven’s last piano sonata forms the close of Kantorow’s recital. Composed in 1822, this work comprises only two movements, a bold departure from the traditional three- or four-movement structure. The two movements stand in opposition as extremes of Beethoven’s musical universe.

The first movement (Maestoso; Allegro con brio e appassionato) is stormy and impassioned, as are many works by Beethoven in C minor. The music seems constantly to attempt to break free from the confines of the piano and drives forward with impelling syncopations, fugal passages, tempestuous gestures, and sharp harmonic shifts. Here is the same relentless drive found in Liszt: the piano as a battlefield, a place where human will clashes with existential weight.

The second movement (Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile) in C major opens with a theme of almost naïve simplicity. In a series of variations, this theme is gradually stretched and transformed. Rhythmic refinement and nearly weightless trills guide the music towards an atmosphere of release and stillness.

Beethoven was once asked why he did not add a third movement to this sonata. His laconic reply was: “I had no time for it.” Yet anyone who hears the sonata understands that a third movement here is simply impossible. At least, this is the opinion of Wendell Kretschmar, a character in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus:

‘We must, he said, hear the work merely to know the answer ourselves. A third movement? A new beginning? A return after this farewell? Impossible! The sonata in general, as a genre, as a traditional art form […] had here reached its conclusion, brought to its completion.’

Waldo Geuns

Pianist Alexandre Kantorow made his international breakthrough in 2019 when he became the first Frenchman ever to win First Prize and the Grand Prix at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Since then, he has worked as a soloist with orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Orchestre national de France and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductors such as Jaap van Zweden, Vasily Petrenko and John Eliot Gardiner. Solo recitals have taken him to stages including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Wiener Konzerthaus, the Philharmonie de Paris and Wigmore Hall in London. In 2024, Kantorow received the quadrennial Gilmore Artist Award and was awarded the honorary title of Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Mérite.