Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables.
Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.
I feel that special secret current between the public and me. I can hold them with one little note in the air, and they will not breathe. That is a great, great moment.
The result was magnificent . . . I became the father of two girls and two boys, lovely children by good fortune they all look like my wife.
Life is the game that must be played, this truth at least, good friends, we know; so live and laugh, nor be dismayed as one by one the phantoms go.
My father, good or bad, mistakes or no, had a direct line from his heart to the music to the people, to the audience. He played with logic and his own inner truth.
Sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me.
I am tired before the concert, not afterward.
