Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a pianist. Born and brought up in Budapest, he decided at the age of 26 that Hungary might suffocate him and emigrated to the west.

He's won many prizes, made many recordings and been acclaimed as one of the world's foremost

interpreters of Mozart and Schubert.

But Celebrity and Glamour hold little interest for him.

It's the music he loves, and he approaches it in a spiritual manner.

Great music he believes is sublime beyond everyday materialism.

When it's going properly he says,

the whole body is playing and my fingers are directed by higher forces.

He is Andrush Schiff.

You make it sound Andrush as if you're almost once removed from the process

as if the music is playing through you. Is that right?

It should be right. We are all aiming at that. We don't always succeed. We are human beings and this is something that you might call inspiration, but you cannot just wait for inspiration.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of discipline and sacrifices.

So obviously it's not entirely a mystical business then,

which is what that suggests when you know that you're directed by higher forces

an awful lot of work goes into it in the first place. A lot of people only see the

glamorous side of being a musician and it's not all that glamorous.

Music is not a job, it's not even a profession, it's a total dedication and I consider it a great privilege.

If I was born a hundred times again, I wouldn't really want to do anything else, except within music I would really love to be a great composer because I consider

composition the highest art of music making.

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