Hello I'm Krestey 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 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a pianist. She comes from Japan but has made her name playing the great German masters, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and particularly Mozart. As a child she was talented but not a prodigy.

It was only when her family moved to Vienna when she was 12

that she was able to immerse herself fully

in the music she loved.

She's won many prizes, although she attaches little importance to them, meticulous, intellectual,

and not a little enigmatic, her aim is always to keep faith with the composer whose work she's

trying to interpret.

She's lived in London for more than 20 years now where she

says, slowly, I feel I've become freer, which means I can give expression to what I've learned.

She is Mitsko or Chida. I've said Mitzko that you weren't a child prodigy, but you were playing a piano at three years old, weren't you?

Yes, that's right. But there was something very peculiar about it.

I cannot remember my first experiences with music,

but I do remember the pieces I was playing at the age of four,

the ones that I liked, even pre, four years old I think because I remember

playing a, for my ear now, a rather nasty workmuller piece for children.

And I liked one of them.

Yes, I had a piano lesson at the age of three and a half and that came because I am the

youngest of three children and my older brother was having a piano lesson and my mother

claims that I started answering his questions and the piano teacher said

well if the little one is more interested than this boy why don't you give her let her play the piano

...