Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.
Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.
As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.
One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.
I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it.
Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.
There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.
I have a definition of success. For me it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me.
I just wish, maybe, that I'd started conducting earlier. I was about 40 when I started. Apart from that I don't really have any regrets. Is that bad?
The conductor's gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed.
Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.
Although I am flexible and ready to take advice, I can't carry an umbrella of thoughts over my head that would distract me and affect my music making.
Open rehearsals reach people who might not otherwise hear the Philharmonic - people on fixed incomes, people who can't move easily at night, students.
I feel growing up in Mumbai is an advantage, as we grow up speaking so many languages that when we go abroad, it becomes easier to learn new languages.
When I was young, I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me, never since have I wasted any more time on tobacco.
I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.
And, over the last thirty years we have seen men's participation in both housework and childcare has increased and women's have stayed at about the same.
As major orchestras around the world are gripped in various kinds of crises and upheaval, we need to be sure that we are bringing up this new generation.
You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology
Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.
At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.
I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.
Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain.
Israel is a piece of real estate that neither Jew or Arab will let go of; neither will leave these shores. And so they will have to learn to live together.
Of course, we also have to play in concert halls. This is our dream when you are a musician - to play in a good, comfortable hall with a wonderful acoustic.
Culture and, within culture, music are the best and most fascinating thing that the German capital has to offer internationally. It is putting that at risk.
'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.
I'm really not a party person. I'm in the business of working with 100 people every day, so I don't revel in meeting a roomful of people in my leisure time.
All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.
Many people learn how to talk, but they don't learn how to listen. Listening to one another is an important thing in life. And music tells us how to do that.
The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.
Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do.
Life is revealed as a place to contribute and we as contributors. Not because we have done a measurable amount of good, but because that is the story we tell.
The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.
For me, Venezuela is very important, not just because it's a place I go to conduct, but because my family is there - my wife, my parents and my musical family.
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.
To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.
But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.
Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.
I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event?
There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.
Soccer and sports are entertainment ... You can't call Beethoven's 9th Symphony or a work of Shakespeare `entertainment.' It's not `entertainment.' It's culture.
They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.
When they are performing in front of the public, they ought to have a sensation that's relatively easy, if the technical and the interpretive work was done before.
When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.
One of the great virtues, apart from the pleasure of performing these works, is that it's opened up an entirely new, expansive repertoire of American Jewish music.
The invisible dilemma is that men face the very real problem that they don't feel comfortable bringing these issues up and they tend not to be acknowledged at work.
Over the years it has been my privilege to lead performances with Saint Louis, the National Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and so many other wonderful organizations.