Can talented musicians be well-rounded people? Some people have more gifts than seems quite fair. Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg is one. This marvel recently won the Queen Elizabeth Piano Competition in Brussels, and has just released a CD of Romantic Sonatas that received a five-star review in this newspaper. He's a proper prodigy, who started lessons at the age of five, when he emigrated with his family from the Soviet Union to Israel. When I met him on a recent visit to the UK he told me cheerily that he practised 13 hours a day in the week leading up to the concerto. "It was wonderful, just to work on those pieces and think about nothing else," he says, completely contradicting the oft-repeated story that he hated the competition. I wonder whether I'll ever experience anything so intense in my life again. That remark makes him seem the model hot-house virtuoso, who would turn out to be not much interested in anything else. In fact Giltburg has a huge hinterland of interests. He has five languages, and for a bit of relaxation he likes to translate poetry between the three he feels he knows best. "Right now I'm working on Rilke's Book of Hours," he says, "because there isn't a good Hebrew translation. Also I'd like to translate all the poetry in Winnie-the-Pooh into Hebrew. That's hard too, but I have the Russian version to help - it's really good, better in some ways than the original. Then he goes off into a long disquisition about the difference between Hebrew and Russian stress-patterns. I ask whether he would have been a linguist if he hadn't been a pianist. No I would have been a computer programmer. I'm a bit of a geek, I love to do coding. It turns out he's also a gifted photographer, and spends every spare minute in London hunting out photography exhibitions. You get the sense he could excel at anything he turned his hand to. Yet music was the thing he trained in; which suggests that a musical training might be good for more than music. A recent article in the New York Times entitled Music: The Key to Success? noted how many strikingly successful people had a musical training to an advanced level. It turned up quite a few examples: Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State under George W Bush, trained to be a professional pianist, Alan Greenspan, one time Chairman of the Federal Reserve was once a professional saxophonist, and the hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner once took piano lessons at the Juilliard. Other examples come to mind. Daniel Liebeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, trained as a musician before turning to architecture. What's interesting is that these budding musicians all went off in different directions. This suggests that what we call a "musical gift" isn't one thing. It's a bundle of aptitudes, each of which is very useful in other circumstances. So a musical training could have unexpected side-effects. For example, someone born with a capacity for fine eye-body co-ordination could undertake musical training, and later go on to become a sportsman. (This also works the other way; a sports training might actually nurture certain aspects of musicality. Chi-chi Nwanoku, double-bass player with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, was all set for a career as an athlete before an injury forced her to focus on the double-bass. Terry Edwards, who for years was Chorus Master at the Royal Opera and performed as a bass singer, was a champion basketball player before he went into music.) Then there are the purely mental aspects of making music; measuring intervals, being able to see that one musical shape is identical to another, when turned upside down. Here, music comes close to maths. At the other end of the scale are the human qualities that a musical training encourages. Empathy, for one - feeling the group dynamic in a rehearsal, knowing when to assert yourself and when to give way. Discipline and self-confidence, for another (or is that another two? They're so bound up with each other it's hard to say). It's no accident that many people in public life were once choristers at one of Britain's choir schools. If you've sung the solo line in a setting of the Magnificat in a cathedral aged nine, and have practised hard to get it just right, then giving a maiden speech in Parliament as a grown-up won't seem so terrifying. The odd thing is that we should be surprised by a phenomenon like Boris Giltburg. At one time it was the norm for any cultivated person to be many-sided, as the word "cultivated" suggests. You need to grow more than one flower in the garden of the human personality, otherwise you end up with a boring monoculture. It's only the hyper-specialisation of modern life that's led to this unhealthy fascination with young technical whizz-kids, who don't have an awful lot to say, but can play really flashy piano pieces very fast. Boris Giltburg appears at the Queen Elizabeth Hall London SE1 on November 14. His new CD Romantic Sonatas is on the Orchid Classics label.