P: My original interest in music came from an orchestral point of view. I guess it's a sound that's been in my ear the longest. There have been periods of listening more to piano music, but they were always brief.

C: How do you aspire to develop artistically?

P: I would like to have a parallel career as pianist and conductor, and I love to teach.

C: What do you think classical music means to my generation? Do you try to speak to younger listeners?

P: I don't have a target audience per se, but I do appreciate seeing a lot of young people at my concert--there seems to be a lot more of them at my stuff than elsewhere. [About his non-observance of certain concert hall traditions] I don't intend to ruffle any feathers, but I'm not adverse to doing so. The people that believe certain things about dress and such, they're pretty much a captive audience. They've got nowhere else to go. For younger people, the way I am is probably more consonant with how they are. They are NOT a captive audience, so if that's what interests them, that's fine. If they weren't interested already, it's not for not having heard the music, although many profess to hate classical music without ever really having heard it. But I see a lot of kids jazzed up about going to see Mozart operas, and I think that's amazing.

C: Do you think a Golden Age of piano playing ever existed, or does everyone simply mythicize the past?

P: There are some old recordings I like a lot, and there are some I don't. Audiences know more than they think they do, but what they think they know, they don't. There may be a dimension [to the so-called Golden Age] in terms of the pure communication of character which may be a little lacking now. People today may be succumbing to the value of the note as opposed to the value of the music. But there's something to be said for being able to put on a record and know instantly who's playing... Horowitz, Gilels, Serkin.... There are certainly pianists who can race down the keyboard at least as fast, and with more accuracy, but Horowitz had style. Who's the Horowitz today? Kissin maybe, but I can't really go there. Maybe Brendel, the more intellectual, is our Serkin. But I like to think I'm doing something different than what's been going on in concert halls for, say, the past 20 years