No?
No. Too much physical work, and I do not want to be more than two weeks in a row away from my family. I was not getting married last year to be permanently away, because I love my family, and we are raising, my wife and me, an eight-year-old daughter, and it is so much fun, and so beautiful, and so fulfilling, that I do not want to stay for two months in an ugly hotel. Believe me, after 30 years in this profession, the hotels are not getting really more beautiful. They are all the same. And a little bit boring. If I could take my family with me, fine. But generally, I like to stay at home.
If I lived in Berlin, I would too.
You don’t know my family! But your position would be right.
Is there a conductor or pianist who's no longer with us that you'd have liked to work with?
Leonard Bernstein, Bruno Walter, Claudio Arrau, Jascha Horenstein, Glenn Gould maybe was a little too crazy for me. I love him very much as an artist, of course, but . . . I like Shura Cherkassky very much as a pianist. I mean, there were a lot, Bruno Walter, Furtwängler, I mean . . . the list is long. I’m in the wonderful position, I just arrived, at seven o’clock, from a rehearsal of one of the most talented and unique musicians of our time — not only musicians but persons of our time, with Daniel Barenboim, I just had a rehearsal of Die schöne Magelone, by Brahms, which we are doing here in the Staatsoper on the 11th of November, in a morning matinee. And it is astonishing. So there some even who are living at the moment. I’m playing next summer in the Salzburg Festival in a big-hall recital with András Schiff. So there are some great pianists around I’m playing with. But the list of the dead musicians I would love to play with is long.
What would you like to do that you haven't yet?
You know what, Schubert wrote 600 songs. Bach wrote more than 200 cantatas. I haven’t sung so much Hugo Wolf in my life, I will definitely do this in the next years. Richard Strauss, for example, I haven’t done very much. There are a lot of challenges. I would love to sing sometime Child of Our Time, by Tippett. I would love to sing the War Requiem again — I’m a big big big Benjamin Britten fan. I would love to sing the “Vagabond” songs by Vaughan Williams in Carnegie Hall maybe in the next years. So there are some things around. I am singing next year with Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra the Verdi Requiem, which will be very exciting and . . . there are some challenges. Don’t worry, a few years I will be around.
