A lot of my musical education was done simply by listening. If you really want to excel on your instrument, it's almost impossible to not develop and analyze what you see and hear and to incorporate all of it into your own playing.

A lot of my musical education was done simply by listening. If you really want to excel on your instrument, it's almost impossible to not develop and analyze what you see and hear and to incorporate all of it into your own playing.

I think one of the most wonderful things we can do as performers is to remind audiences that they can still relate to the emotions and feelings, as though the music had been written yesterday.

For Rostropovich, every single note that he played had a special kind of human meaning behind it. And this was something that he expressed and demanded of everyone who worked with him, who wanted to rise up to that level.

The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.

The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.

We all know that there are many people that can play the instrument perfectly today, up and down with technical perfection, but does the sound connect internally, do they touch people's hearts, how creative are they.... ?