“I swallowed the whole thing and now it’s inside me,” says the French pianist of his teacher’s words of wisdom.

You started playing piano at a very early age. What inspired you to become a pianist?

When I was two and a half, my parents had a dinner at a friend’s house – a piano teacher – and she asked them to bring me. She had a beautiful French grand piano – a 1926 Pleyel – which she played a bit and showed me how the mechanism worked. Apparently I was totally amazed by this. In the middle of the night I woke up in this house that I didn’t know, I climbed down the stairs in the darkness and asked to see the piano again. After that I was saying regularly, “I want to play the piano, I want to play the piano!” The teacher said it was too early, of course, that I should wait until I was five. The day of my birthday I went to her house and said, “Now I’m five, I want to play the piano.”

The piano was really something I was obsessed with. When I started I never thought, “Oh wow, I’ll...