As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.

Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.

When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.

Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.

Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.