The prodigiously gifted Alexandre Kantorow here offers spellbinding performances of two of the 19th century’s greatest and most influential piano works. There’s Brahms’ Piano Sonata No. 1, an early work that, Kantorow tells Apple Music Classical, represents the composer’s “idealistic vision of what the piano could do,” musically and technically. The program finishes with Schubert’s rule-book ripping, far-reaching Fantasy in C Major from 1822, his “Wanderer Fantasy,” a colossal one-movement creation that, over 30 years later, would become the model for Liszt’s great B Minor Sonata (completed the same year as Brahms’ First Sonata). With both works placing songs at the heart of their slow movements, a selection of Liszt’s arrangements of Schubert Lieder provides a beautiful contrast to, and a bridge between, these monumental sonatas. “Brahms and Schubert are composers who appear here at their most ambitious and trying music that was maybe larger than they needed to write,” Kantorow tells Apple Music Classical, “but that creates a lot of excitement and huge mountains to climb.” Composed in the flush of Brahms’ early career, his Sonata No. 1 was an early calling-card and shows him already embarking on ambitious structures which later burgeoned in his ventures into large-form orchestral music. “The three piano sonatas Brahms wrote were basically his symphonies—the music imitates every instrument of the orchestra,” says Kantorow. From the opening bar, where Brahms builds mountains of sound from wide chords and relentless leaps, through to the achingly beautiful “Andante,” the rustic third movement, and the rhythmic power of the finale, Kantorow matches surgical precision and articulation with a natural sense of the music’s ebb and flow. It’s all achieved through the most responsive of piano touches, subtle use of rubato, and keenly judged dynamic gradations. And Kantorow brings that clarity and wide color palette to five Schubert songs, each arranged by Liszt, including “Der Wanderer,” the basis for Schubert’s piano fantasy. “Schubert presents the best challenges for Liszt,” says Kantorow. “Liszt was obsessed with the three-minute song, with the piano’s ability to imitate anything. With Schubert’s songs, you’ve got everything that Liszt likes. You’ve got the fantastical and you’ve got personifications of death, and the talking brook. At the same time, you’ve got very clear emotions. Small forms helped him a lot.” Liszt creates extraordinarily vivid soundscapes in each song, such as “Am Meer” (“By the Sea”), dark and brooding, and a showcase for Kantorow’s whirlwind virtuosity. Like the Brahms Sonata, Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy,” another huge influence on Franz Liszt, explodes from its opening bar in the joyous key of C. But unlike the Brahms, Schubert creates structure not from separate movements, but from melodic and rhythmic ideas. “There’s this organic union between the movements that are not separated musically,” explains Kantorow; “They are all linked by the same rhythms that drive the whole ‘Wanderer Fantasy,’” so-named later by Liszt because of its use of the “Der Wanderer” theme in the “Adagio.” Through the piece, Schubert takes us on a journey of keys, variations, and transformations, but, says Kantorow, “you always get the sense that there’s only a few notes at the beginning that are the roots of the whole piece.” The Sonata presents huge technical challenges. Even Kantorow confesses that there are “a lot of very difficult passages that are not very pianistic. Schubert didn’t think anybody could perform it. He couldn't perform it himself. So it’s probably one of his works that fitted perfectly into his mind but could never be done in a physical world. And yet within this seemingly impossible score is music of such delicate balance, where Schubert constantly plays with our expectations, moving seamlessly from dark to light and back again. “Playing the ‘Wanderer Fantasy,’ it’s so hard to contain yourself because there’s such a rush of adrenaline, and a motion of going forward and expanding constantly. He writes such insane nuances. From the very beginning he already asks for double forte. There is so much written with loud dynamics, and you get very carried away.”