The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was supposed to make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on March 25, 2020, as a late replacement for the ailing Murray Perahia. When Kantorow, 26, finally made it to Carnegie on Sunday afternoon, it was again as a substitute for an eminent colleague, this time Maurizio Pollini. This wasn’t Kantorow’s first time playing at Carnegie; he performed two pieces at Zankel Hall in 2019, as one of the winners of that year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. But Sunday’s very fine recital, on the hall’s main stage, was a wholly different kind of platform. And he arrived with expectations ratcheted up even higher than if he had merely (ha) won the Tchaikovsky.

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Persons: Alexandre Kantorow, Murray Perahia, Kantorow, Maurizio Pollini, Alice Tully Hall, Tchaikovsky, MacArthur, he’d Organizations: Carnegie Hall, Carnegie, Hall Locations: French