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.

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.

If I were to run around the world playing just the cello concertos - and believe me, I love playing them - I would be counting my entire repertoire from year to year on my two hands.

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.

The realm of classical music is so vast - not only in terms of style but of era, age and the purposes for which it was composed - it is an enormous art form.

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.