We all know that there are many people that can play the instrument perfectly today, up and down with technical perfection, but does the sound connec….

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 demand….

I think you can tell a lot from the lives of many of today's great soloists. Their participation and gravitation towards chamber music is ever increa….

The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The musi….

I would say that for the younger musicians, technical proficiency is necessary and a given these days. But the study and the way you function in soci….

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 f….

Being an artist and a musician, I have witnessed the previous generation taking the art form, not as a way of making a living, but as a belief, an al….

Even if you are a pianist, your concerto repertoire is very limited compared to what your chamber repertoire would be if you were a chamber music pia….

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 ha….

The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idi….

Beginning in the nineteenth century, with performers like Franz Liszt, were musicians who were able to excite an audience and communicate on a whole ….

I think one of the most wonderful things we can do as performers is to remind audiences that they can still relate to the emotions and feelings, as t….

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 l….

Our interpretations through the years and generations have always changed, but the emotions, ideas, and the thoughts of the composers are still with ….

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….

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 a….