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.

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.... ?

I think you can tell a lot from the lives of many of today's great soloists. Their participation and gravitation towards chamber music is ever increasing.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, with performers like Franz Liszt, were musicians who were able to excite an audience and communicate on a whole new level.

Even if you are a pianist, your concerto repertoire is very limited compared to what your chamber repertoire would be if you were a chamber music pianist.

When I finally got together with Rostropovich as a student, he was very focused, almost entirely focused on the music itself, on what the composer had in mind and what he knew about the composer. Many of the works that I played for him had in fact been composed and written for him; he was often the first performer of these works, having known the composers personally.

I don't think too much about the past when I am actually playing, I prefer to concentrate on the present. The performance of a piece, no matter how long ago or where it was written, is always a new production, something that comes alive in the present. And it doesn't matter if the piece was written two or three hundred years ago if it is alive in us.