Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 1; Wanderer Fantasy

Alexandre Kantorow’s recording of Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 1 and Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, released on the Swedish label BIS Records, won Gramophone’s Piano Award in 2025. The disc completes a trilogy Kantorow began in 2020, recording Brahms’s three numbered piano sonatas for BIS one at a time rather than as a single boxed release, this final instalment pairs the earliest of the three, Brahms’s youthful Op. 1, with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, one of the most technically demanding single works in the solo piano repertoire.

About the programme

Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major, Op. 1, was the work he chose to introduce himself to Robert and Clara Schumann in 1853, at only twenty years old, a large-scale, four-movement sonata that announced an ambitious young composer working confidently in a Beethoven-descended tradition rather than offering a smaller-scale calling card. Between the two major works, the disc carries a short group of song transcriptions, a bridging gesture common on recital discs that pair large-scale sonata repertoire with something more compact. Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, D. 760, closes the programme, a single continuous work built from four linked sections drawing on Schubert’s own song “Der Wanderer,” and notorious among pianists for technical demands that, according to often-repeated accounts, Schubert himself found too difficult to play through cleanly. The piece’s continuous, cyclically linked structure, four sections played without a break, all growing from shared thematic material, also proved influential on later composers: Liszt admired it enough to make his own arrangement for piano and orchestra, and its one-movement, multi-section design fed into the cyclic, single-span structures Liszt himself later used in works such as his own Piano Sonata in B minor. Pairing an ambitious 20-year-old’s first published sonata with one of the repertoire’s most punishing single-movement showpieces gives the disc a clear internal logic: both works are, in different ways, about a young composer testing the outer limits of what a solo piano piece could carry.

About the performer

Alexandre Kantorow, a French pianist, won the Gold Medal at the 2019 Tchaikovsky International Competition, becoming the first French pianist to do so, along with the competition’s Grand Prix, awarded to the strongest performer across the entire event rather than to a single-instrument category winner. His recording career with BIS has centred on a distinctive niche within the mainstream piano repertoire, including this now-completed Brahms sonata cycle, building a reputation for large-scale Romantic repertoire delivered with a technical assurance that lets him take on works like the Wanderer Fantasy without the piece’s difficulty becoming the headline story.

About the label

BIS Records is a Swedish label founded in 1973 by Robert von Bahr, built from the outset around a commitment to recorded sound quality and a distinctive, often adventurous catalogue that has ranged well beyond mainstream repertoire, complete-works surveys of comparatively neglected composers alongside more familiar names. Kantorow’s association with the label, including this now-complete Brahms sonata cycle, sits within that same house identity: a young, internationally prominent competition winner recording large-scale core repertoire for a label that built its reputation on audiophile-grade engineering as much as on any particular repertoire specialism, releasing this disc as a Super Audio CD to match.

A note on this page

This review is freshly written to cover a real, current recording, rather than recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, the shop closed years before this disc existed. It’s part of the site’s coverage of new classical releases and current award-winners, written from independently verified facts, alongside the material recovered from the original site’s run.