Michael Berkeley's 'Sonata' is very - what can you say - melodious.

My teachers said, 'Always keep a Beethoven sonata under your fingers.' I always have. I still play chamber music, and I always play classical.

Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there.

When people ask me for playlists, I always put in 'Moonlight Sonata' because it is my favorite song. I play it all the time.

I really love to play 'Moonlight Sonata' by Beethoven. I can still read music, but I need to practise more. The way your fingers move - it's something that comes from memory. I love music.

The first dramatic experience I had of music was when I was five. The electricity had gone out in Georgia, and my mum played the 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano.

Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.

Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.

I think, bad times, I sit down and I play - there's definitely certain songs that touch in certain ways. I go back to 'Moonlight Sonata' by Beethoven; that usually takes care of everything.

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer.

I didn't want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say, 'Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time.'