Iwas around seven years old when I first listened to the Mozart Requiem and since then it has been the piece of music for me – it completely moved something in myself and I found my musical paradise in a way, even though it’s quite dramatic and heartbreaking as music. You know, at that time in Georgia in the ’90s we didn’t really have the musical equipment for playing CDs. My mother bought copies of CDs on audio cassettes and every night before going to sleep I would listen to this Requiem. Later, when I listened to a lot of different versions, I couldn’t find this one to revive my childhood memories. So I bought the Giulini, which is a quite different way of performing it – it’s amazing. But what is the connection between Mozart’s Requiem and a child’s perception of it? It’s so dark sometimes but also beautiful – like life – but why would a seven-year-old child love it? I don’t know.

Ivry Gitlis is one of the great musicians of our day. I know he passed away but he’s still here with us, I think. What music means to me is found in one simple recording of Ivry Gitlis. He does something that in my opinion nobody has achieved, and he does it so naturally, simply and directly. The way he says things touches something in us. He was a genius violinist and a genius person. I was living in Paris at the same time as him in his last years and we became friends. He was a huge inspiration for me as a human being and as a friend – a genius of music, of words … he was writing poetry, he was an actor. Everything he did was so remarkable, unique and filled with life. And he never pretended. Not in front of the public, not in front of anybody. I think we’re missing people like that today.

This particular album of Keith Jarrett, I don’t know what happened. I just wanted to listen to it over and over. It’s just his simplicity. He can be over all the piano using everything the instrument can offer – very interesting and fascinating – but this album is something different. It’s not jazz, it’s not classical – it’s hard to define – yet also it is everything. He just wants to use any capacity that a human being might have. I guess he needs to search and search and go further and further, and not to see the limit. And that you can see in his improvisations. Here he only wants the essence of it, and that was inspirational for me as a human being and as an artist – to search all the time to see that I have no limits but at the same time not to forget what is the essence.

Jacqueline du Pré. Oh my God. If we can translate music into words, probably I would choose poetry or maybe Thomas Mann. He describes music in a way that is moving and transformative. If I have to choose a person to say that music could be somehow expressed in a human being, I would say Jacqueline du Pré. Everything she does, her phrasing, how she breathes, how she is inspired by life – it’s almost choreographical. She kind of embodied music itself. Maybe that’s why she’s not here any more. There are people who just leave those moments so completely that there is no continuation. It ends and that’s that. You can feel the sadness already, as if her fate is already there. She gives everything with joy. She really wants to give it all. She is the sound of music herself.

I was on tour as a trio with Gidon Kremer and Giedre. Dirvanauskaite. and we were watching a movie called Before Sunset. At the end of the movie the girl is talking about this live performance of Nina Simone in Paris. We hear her playing the piano with her band and she’s singing this song, and that’s how I discovered Nina Simone. She starts to play and it’s not like normal musical phrasing. It’s like she never wants these phrases to end – like a life path. And I said ‘What is this? Who is this woman?’ And I googled her. This amazing voice which is jazz but not jazz and has had such an influence on other artists. Then I discovered she had wanted to be a [classical] pianist. And she cried in an interview recalling how she applied to be a pianist but wasn’t accepted because of racism. This tragedy of not being able to do what you wanted to do – but then being a genius singer! So after seeing this movie I became a fan and bought all her albums. I just love her. IP

This feature originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano