PHILIPPE CASSARD has been a favourite with Irish audiences since he won the first Dublin International Piano Competition back in 1988. But he's not just a popular figure; he's also what you would have to call a musicians' musician.

When I meet him in Dublin, the day after his all-Schubert programme at the National Concert Hall last week, it is music he wants to talk about, first and foremost.

He's been immersing himself in Schubert, and he launches, with a sense of reverential wonder, into a discussion of what he's been discovering in the latest major work he's been studying and playing, the late Sonata in A.

He sings, he outlines the curves of melodic lines like a conductor, he plays air-piano to emphasise and elucidate his points. He talks in the most minute detail about the significance of various markings in the score and offers assessments of various published editions. His favourite is the one from Bärenreiter, and he likes it because it comes with a supplement of Schubert's drafts. These run to nearly as many pages as the completed work itself, and Cassard clearly lives in the hope of unravelling their every secret.

He has more than just the motivation of a performer for doing this. He's developed a second career as a broadcaster in his native France. He presents a weekly radio programme on France Musique under the title Notes du traducteur (Translator's Notes). The programmes investigate the mysteries of musical interpretation, unravelling the meanings of the symbols and instructions in the score, painting in the broader cultural contexts, and Cassard records them as presentations before a studio audience. He makes it sound not like a forum for solutions and conclusions, but rather one of questions and explorations.

Cassard seems to have never felt himself to be the competition type. But, when he came to Dublin in 1988, he was, as it were, under starter's orders. He had been signed up by a young agent, and she issued him a caution that, if he was going to go to Dublin, he must come back a winner. If he didn't win, she seemed to be suggesting, he would become like damaged goods, much harder for her to sell.

Competition success is one of those experiences in life which seems very different, depending on whether it's in front of you, or behind you. In front of you, it's a goal, a place to arrive at. Behind you, it's just an opening that you've made it through, and you now have access to concerts, media attention, the curiosity of the profession.

"That was the greatest merit of the Dublin International Piano Competition, to provide so many opportunities all around the world." The opening, says Cassard, is actually quite a short one. It lasts for a year or two, at most, and it's constantly getting shorter, rather than longer.

He sums up the biggest difference between competitions now and 20 years ago with one word - China. He reels off statistics. "Fifty million young piano students, 35 music schools in Shanghai alone," and suggests that performers from this new musical world have an eagerness, a hunger, a selflessness, even, that people in what he amusingly calls "old Europe, and old America" no longer have.

The cliché used to be that pianists from Japan, South Korea and China played with a kind of note-perfect dullness. But that's certainly not the case any more. Cassard was chairman of the 2007 Epinal competition where two of the finalists were from South Korea, and one from China. Ho-Yeul Lim, the South Korean who took the top prize, won on grounds of artistry, says Cassard.

He's no fan at all of China's most famous pianist export, Lang Lang, a man, he says, "who can play faster than his own shadow, and feels always so happy playing fast, although empty of the least spirit".

The current situation for young pianists, he says, is altogether tougher than the one he faced back in 1988. The competition is more fierce, recognition much harder to find, a career much more difficult to sustain. And, he suggests, some of this actually gets reflected in the quality of the playing. The hardness of the struggle somehow makes its way into the music-making.

In the 1990s, Cassard branched out into festivals, founding Les Estivales de Gerberoy in 1997, and becoming artistic director of Nuits Romantiques du Lac du Bourget in 1999. He takes a master chef's delight in the musical menus he's been able to prepare, but he's forgoing the role of artistic director in favour of the radio programmes, and more time to work on repertoire.

His next big project, to perform and to discuss, involves the late piano works of Brahms. In a flash, we're talking interpretative detail again, and I draw in a reference to Sviatoslav Richter's unwavering tempo in the final Rhapsody in E flat, a work where most players relax the speed at some point.

Cassard, it turns out, turned pages for Richter in this piece. "If you move too slow, I'll kill you," Richter told him a minute before the first of the 12 recitals Cassard turned pages for him.

He remembers, also, the wording of the small paragraph Richter wrote in the programmes; it was not why he played with the music in front of him, but "Why I don't play without the score".

"The oblique," says Cassard, "is sometimes much more interesting than the direct."

ANTTI SIIRALA, WINNER of the 2003 piano competitions in Dublin and Leeds, was born into a family of professional musicians. His father is a pianist and his mother a violinist, and both are currently teachers at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. But they were the opposite of pushy when it came to musical education within the family. He was six before he started piano lessons, and didn't practise really seriously until much later. He has no explanation for why he got interested in the piano, rather than any other instrument, or why he began to take music more seriously and decided to pursue it as a profession.

The competition circuit seemed a natural progression to him. It provided goals to work towards, and it brought the kind of exposure that can be so difficult for young musicians to get. Dublin and Leeds are not the only competitions he won. He also took the top prize in the Beethoven Competition in Vienna - at the tender age of 18 - and at the World Piano Competition in London.

The London success was unusual enough to earn him a place of some kind in the history books. In the 2000 competition, he was eliminated at the semi-final stage, and he was already on his way home when he received a surprise contact from the organisers.

Martin Cousin, one of the finalists, had been taken ill and might not have been able to complete the competition. Siirala was the player next in line in the jury's rankings, and he was asked if he would come back.

"It was very, very bizarre. I was going home, and they called me back, first just to rehearse, and then to be ready to step down in case the guy recovers. And I told them I wouldn't come back on that basis.

"Anyway, he had Rachmaninov's Third to do, which wouldn't really be possible without rehearsals. And then I won in the end, which was very surprising." The way things fell out may well have been to his advantage. He had less time than the other finalists for the build-up of nerves, and effectively he had nothing to lose. "I remember feeling more relaxed than I probably would have otherwise."

Siirala had planned to compete at Leeds in 2003, but dithered for a while after his Dublin success - the Dublin competition was in May, Leeds in September. "In the end, I decided to go, because I had never done any of the really big competitions: I had never done Brussels, I was never in Moscow, I hadn't done the Van Cliburn. I wanted to try to do one of the really major ones. Now I'm happy I did, though for a while I thought it was a kind of overkill to go there."

There's almost nothing in his conversation to suggest that any kind of overkill would appeal to him. He seems set on finding a balance in his professional life, and the kind of raw ambition that many people associate with competition winners is nowhere in evidence. He's even relaxed about the fact that his competition successes in London and Leeds haven't really made him a megastar in Britain. He secured a good agent in Germany, where he is a lot more active.

That doesn't mean he shirks the big gesture. Straight after Leeds, he started a project to perform the complete piano works of Beethoven in 12 recitals, and not just the sonatas. He paced himself at three programmes a year, and has just completed the project. So, at the moment, he's happy not to have what he calls "any major physical goals". He's taken up teaching, which he enjoys enormously, and is still assimilating new repertoire. But he's happy to be in the position of not having a constant worry about the light at the end of the tunnel.

Four first prizes in international competitions is a good record by any standards. Siirala doesn't think there's any particular secret to success in competitions. He's heard all the conspiracy theories about juries, about who will do well in particular competitions, about who won't and why, but he dismisses them all.

"What the jurors want to find is someone with individuality, doing something interesting. That's what the competition wants to find, somebody who could be a star representing them in the future. Finding your own repertoire, finding out what you're good at, and playing that in your own way, I think that's all you can do in the end."

Philippe Cassard's latest CD, of Schubert's Impromptus, is on Universal Classics France. Antti Siirala plays at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which runs in Bantry House, Co Cork, from Sat, June 28 to Sun, July 6.