There's a substantial portion of my recorded repertoire that was learned for the recording sessions, and then basically forgotten. I wouldn't say it's the majority, but it's a fairly good chunk of it.

My father ran the gamut: a favorite of his was Josef Hofmann, but there was also Friedman, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky, Lhevinne, Moiseiwitsch, Paderewski, etc.

There's a substantial portion of my recorded repertoire that was learned for the recording sessions, and then basically forgotten. I wouldn't say it's the majority, but it's a fairly good chunk of it.

To be perfectly honest, I was never really aware that I had any special abilities. When you have what you have, you don't really think about what you don't have; you simply work with what you have.

I don't listen to recordings very much now, to be perfectly honest. I listened to them a lot when I was younger.

My father was a very good amateur pianist, and he had a collection of books on technique. One of the things he had was a small volume of exercises by Rudolf Ganz, in which Ganz mentions the pedagogical work of the Swiss composer, Émile-Robert Blanchet, who wrote a ton of polyphonic exercises for one-hand. These exercises were a great help for finger independence, which I acquired early on. This might have given me somewhat of an edge, a facility to be able to knock any obstacle that was in my way.

That is my way of doing things, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to anybody else; if you need to do technical exercises, you do them. The whole point of practicing is to get to know yourself, to know your weaknesses and to zero in on them and target them. It's not really about employing anybody else's formulas, because you really have to find what is best for you and what you need.