François-Frédéric Guy regards his first recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier (for Harmonia Mundi) as crucial to his subsequent career. “It was released in 1998,” he says, “and a lot of things changed immediately. There were many concerts, people interested in what I was doing, critical attention. The second crucial event at that early stage was that a very good friend of mine secured a concert for me at Wigmore Hall in London. He invited all the agents, and that forged the vital link with my agent, Van Walsum.”

Other leaps forwards in his career have included his debut recital at the Berlin Philharmonie, which moved the critic of the Berliner Morgenpost to write: “Guy is a pianist of astonishing expressiveness, with immaculate pianistic technique... a man of the present even when he plays Schubert.” Guy received great acclaim at his Proms debut in 2006, playing the Ravel Concerto with the Philharmonia and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. He regards his increasingly fruitful relationship with the London orchestras as a significant development.

In recent years, Guy has found concerto partnerships more satisfying than was always the case at the outset of his career. “My approach has always been to treat music for piano and orchestra as very big chamber music. But when you play chamber music you rehearse many times. Frustratingly, when you play with orchestra you have only one rehearsal – you have to compromise on everything, and it’s music-making by lowest common denominator.

“Yet sometimes you can go further. You don’t always know why. It can be a matter of personality, immediate rapport. With some conductors I feel immediately that I don’t have to compromise, because there is such a high level of communication. When I was regarded as a ‘young’ pianist, many conductors took advantage of that. It can be difficult to establish your right to think independently! Now it has changed a lot. I have confidence and a great deal of experience. The psychological aspects are an important part of the challenge we face in this profession, and should not be neglected.”