Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever.

Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

If you're playing within your capability, what's the point? If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so its difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.