I try to create the illusion that I have an audience there

"I try to create the illusion that I have an audience there in front of me," he says. He'd play a climax, and the impact was unbelievable - not because he was louder or more forceful than other cellists, but because of the way he prepared a particular phrase."Bronfman views preparation as being very much of the essence - certainly in recording, where he prefers a minimum of fuss and a maximum of spontaneity. "When you listen to really great performers," he says, "you soon realise how important that is Casals was a good example of what I mean. Then, hopefully, I would prove to myself that I was wrong to think that it shouldn't be there!"But for Yefim Bronfman, it's not so much "what" you read, as "how" you read it. Anyway, I would try to compromise - first by finding out why the marking was there in the first place, and then by investigating other editions of the same piece. "I have to tell you that if I just went ahead and `did it my way' I would feel very guilty - and you know all about Jewish guilt! I have to live with that. I hope that I, too, achieve that sometimes."I ask Bronfman whether obedience to the letter ever conflicts with musical instinct He grins mischievously.

Some people find that the hardest challenge of all is to strip away all unnecessary emotionalism and get to the `source'. The more you get to know a piece, the more you understand its language and the more things you can `do' with it. On the other hand, you occasionally discover you can do less. "It includes some of the most hair-raising piano-playing I've ever heard." His own interpretation has developed considerably since the first time he played the work three years ago: "It's getting a different shape. Best of all is the last movement, where the second subject enters almost like a lullaby.

There's so much in the piece: it can be biting, grand and very romantic, almost in the manner of Schumann."Bronfman learnt the concerto from an early Ashkenazy recording, made live in concert at the Moscow Conservatory. By the time you've finished, you're ready for the ambulance; but then you have to deal with the perpetuum mobile second movement, which poses completely different technical problems - it's such a sarcastic piece - and there's the punchy Intermezzo, which is different again. "It is also the most `virtuoso' work in the series; and when it comes to endurance, no concerto I know of is more demanding. Imagine coming out on to the stage, playing the introduction to the first movement and launching into that enormous, seven-minute cadenza. You talk about his mellowing, and yet his Ninth Piano Sonata is inventive, intimate and abstract - a real `summing up' of his life's work."Of all the Prokofiev piano works that Bronfman has tackled so far, the Second Concerto ranks among the greatest "I feel that it's his best piano concerto," he says.

Take Bartok, the composer of such aggressive pieces as The Miraculous Mandarin ballet, the Piano Sonata and the First Piano Concerto. Then, suddenly, you have far mellower works like the Third Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra; or, in the case of Shostakovich, there's the Viola Sonata. You and I haven't experienced old age yet, but one day our lives will draw towards a close and our attitudes will change. And that `change' can be either a softening of style or a greater drive towards the abstract - as with Matisse, or, indeed, Prokofiev.