Composer

Many people who don't like Rachmaninov's style consider the 'Rhapsody' his masterpiece. It's written fantastically well for orchestra and piano. He combines a lot of effervescence with a deep, Romantic spirit.

I've always written - about music, art, things going on around the world. The danger is that it becomes too personal. I don't think people want it at that level of intimacy.

I think it all comes from the same source, really, the writing of music, the writing of words, the playing of music. It's what drives anyone to be interested in the arts. I think it's a poetic gene; it's a wanting to go beyond.

I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night - the worst kind of teenage alienation.

If you arrive at a concert ready to play your piece, that's not nearly good enough. You must have your music ready to the point where you can play it on a short rehearsal, after a long plane flight, on a strange piano, having had an unpleasant lunch, in an unfriendly atmosphere. You have to be so over-prepared that you can cope with anything.

They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.

Live in the present moment. The past and future are nonexistent. Only the present can be grasped or, better, embraced.

There's certainly no doubt that commercialism has entered classical music to such a degree that almost no one seems to care anymore about the physical and mental health of the performer.

I like the extras in life. Concentrating on serious things doesn't mean you can't also enjoy the lighter ones.

Discovering how to spend leisure time well, especially during a time of austerity, could be as important in the effort to reduce crime as having extra police on the streets, and increasing the population of concert halls may actually help decrease the population of prisons.

Unlike a high-wire walker, I don't think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin's strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.

I really feel something's missing if I'm not writing.

Out of silence is born concentration, and from that comes learning.

The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.

Schubert, Franck, and Liszt were all Roman Catholics who questioned or doubted or lived in different ways, and religion was certainly part of all their lives.

Brahms is life-changing every time. And though I love him, I can't say that about Mompou.

I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn't express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

I've twice been on the point of giving up my performing career to train for the priesthood.

There are artists who delight listeners with their wild and daring individuality; there are others who uncover the written score with reverence. There are few who can do both.