Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.
You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
It's nice not to have the majority of the attention on me like there is when playing a concerto with an orchestra.
I don't have a classical-music mentality. I haven't been taught that way, and it doesn't fit my character, either.
It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
In concertos, I stand up, and I conduct with the bow when I'm not playing. During symphonies, I sit, but sometimes I stop playing to conduct. Being seated in a section allows me to feel more like we're playing chamber music, which is how I like to approach it.
Brahms is one of my all-time favorite composers.
When facing symphonic orchestras which have played some works five thousands times, you have nothing to do.
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.