I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure.
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.
Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.
If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.
I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
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.
I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.
The Four Seasons was making me popular in Britain, but EMI America had no interest in making that happen in the States, so I just had a classical career there.