No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.
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.
I want music to move me, and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.
In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.
Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.
