For one half of the 2Cellos duo there are only two kinds of music: good and bad.

Did you have a very traditional music education?

We had a classical music education. We studied, got Master’s degrees in classical music. We mostly listened to classical music for many, many years and then gradually we started expanding horizons and listening to other kinds of music like pop, rock and film music. All kinds of music. And then we wanted to experiment on our instruments – cello – and tried to do something with more variety, you know, tried to expand the possibilities of playing the cello.

I’m a cello player and classical musicians were our heroes at the time, but later on we started discovering other artists that we started looking up to. It’s a combination of all these artists that influence us.

You and Luka rose to prominence with your YouTube cover of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal. Had you been experimenting with different genres before that?

Not really, no. This was the first experiment and it was so successful it changed our lives overnight.

Were you surprised by the video’s success?

We believed it was going to be a success, but we...