I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever.

If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

If you're playing within your capability, what's the point? If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.

I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure.

The Beatles are a classical group because they're classic.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so its difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.