On the cover of his latest album, Alexandre Kantorow’s left arm falls back behind a piano bench. A wave builds slowly from his dangled palm, up through the straight line of his bare forearm, and crests around his shoulders before breaking, down through his arched neck and deeply bowed head, leaving, in the wash, his right hand at the keys.

In this strikingly fluid photograph, taken by Fadi Kheir during Kantorow’s Carnegie Hall debut in 2023, he appears first as an unusually relaxed performer in flow. But the image reveals a second character. In the long hair draped messily over the keys, the single left sleeve rolled up, and the sliver of calf revealed between trouser and boot, a bohemian peeks through: slightly unkempt and, perhaps, not easy to tame.

Kantorow, 27, plays with a sound that roars, with depth and clarity. And the classical music industry has taken notice: After winning the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019, and the Gilmore Artist Award in 2023, his career has been on a rapid rise. On Jan. 24, he will make his debut at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”

As the first French pianist to win either the Gold Medal or the Gilmore, he has earned a degree of fame in his home country. Kantorow also gained worldwide notice last summer, when he was seen with a crystal-embellished shirt and fuzzy beard, performing Ravel’s “Jeux d’Eau” in the pouring rain during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. (After the performance, the France3 channel declared him “heroic and unflappable.”) In November, a reviewer for Le Monde reported that, outside a Kantorow performance at the Philharmonie in Paris, a group of fans stood holding signs that read “cherche place,” or “looking for a seat.”