Changing Tunes

I loved reading about the 27-year-old French pianist Alexandre Kantorow, a rising star in the classical world who’s won major awards, played in the rain in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics and is set to make his debut at the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Friday. What struck me about Kantorow is his commitment to keeping his life and his working practices the same, even as he seems destined for fame, even as fans crowd outside his performances holding signs begging for seats.

“I don’t really like change, and unnecessary change in life,” Kantorow told The Times. He’s had the same manager and teacher since he was 16 and remains with his small record label.

Resisting unnecessary change, what a concept! In the stock fantasy of fame, one imagines all the ways in which their life will transform, each upgrade bigger and flashier. I can’t pretend to know what it would feel like to be a musician on the precipice of stardom, but I’d guess the temptation to shed one’s old ways of working would be fierce.

Listening to Kantorow’s latest album, a collection of Brahms and Schubert pieces, I wondered how a commitment to keeping things stable affects an artist’s output. Will the “intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music-making,” as the classical music critic Zachary Woolfe put it, be altered by the inevitable changes that accompany success? What about an artist is essential, impervious to any external forces?

I recently rewatched “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s concert film of the Rolling Stones’s performances at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2006. The intimate way the film is shot makes you feel that you’re onstage, up close watching artists make art. You forget that you’re observing one of the most successful rock bands in history, that these people have played these songs a million times, that they are basically unknowable in their fame and riches and the way the world regards them. Instead they feel familiar, almost cozily accessible. The ways in which celebrity and fortune have changed them feel beside the point. The early 21st-century Mick Jagger of “Shine a Light” is to this fan essentially the same as the one strutting in 1970’s “Gimme Shelter,” the same one romancing the crowd during the Stones’ “Hackney Diamonds” tour last year.

The idea of there being something fundamentally stable about an artist, independent of outside forces, makes sense. It’s what allows them to experiment with style and genre and persona and still be legible to their audiences. Of course, fans are well known to accuse the artists they love of abandoning their them-ness (see: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival), of changing beyond recognition. As annoying as this must be for an artist, I wonder if there is something sort of wonderful about having a fan base that wants you to stay true, that so loves what they think is the elemental part of you that they want to help you safeguard it.