Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm having a blast being the music director at the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. It certainly is challenging for me, but I love challenges.
I love the outdoor festival feeling. When I'm on stage, it's very gratifying to watch people on the lawns enjoying the music with a glass of wine.
Let me be very honest and just say that if any airline would let me take the violin and the laptop on board I would fly that airline all the time.
There are many ways to get involved with lives or communities and enrich the minds of others through music, but you really have to want to do this.
I have discovered three things which know no geographical borders - classical music, American jazz, and applause as the sign of the public's favor.
When I was 4 or 5, I attended my father's concerts. He very often played Strauss waltzes as encores and I saw something happening with the audience.
You never know what you're going to learn from which pieces and which composers and colleagues are going to influence that thing you think you know.
My teacher, Josef Gingold, a student of the French school, always loved the music of Saint-Saens and Henri Vieuxtemps and all the French repertoire.
At a grand evening service in a church, my concerto created such a furor that the worshippers rushed out to keep the crowd outside the church quiet.
The gospel moves us to see others as people created in God's image and that can have a profound impact on people's productivity and work satisfaction.
I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time.
I'm a mushroom freak. I make a mushroom soup where I use maybe six or seven varieties, not just portobello and shiitake, but dried porcini and morels.
Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.
When I hear people clapping at the wrong times, I think that's great. We have got a listener that's not used to going to - we have got a new listener.
Although I do not have a family, I have eyes, ears and imagination, and know, as most people know, that the importance of one's children is paramount.
I was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1917, May the 28th. So you can figure that out; that's a long ways off. Oh, I've been around a long time.
The gospel has brought a new identity in Christ that then allows our work to no longer be the source of our identity but the rightful expression of it.
With a Grammy, if you're releasing your record with a major label, you have a chance with any record. You also have a very long shot with every record.
My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.
In music you can find your own niche. You can do what you want to do. There is really no job description. You have to find your own way, and that's fun.
A conductor can do wild things which can feel forced, but if you're directing from within the orchestra, you can't do that, things have to feel natural.
Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say, 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.
If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.
When you have live music in the background, people are usually talking over it. You don't actually get to listen to live music in your space all the time.
If you put your hand on the piano, you play a note. It's in tune. But if you put it on the violin, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You have to figure it out.
I think you can appreciate different interpretations. Art is not a contest. I can even appreciate hearing someone play something in a way that I wouldn't.
There was a time, early on in my career, when it was very important for me to be liked by everyone. It meant that I was musically less honest with myself.
For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university.
Economic and political structures that have a far sweeping impact on the lives of billions is not outside the purview of the gospel's redemptive influence.
The danger in playing a piece over and over again lies in getting stuck in a rut where you don't ask questions anymore and you always play it the same way.
Teaching is really very, very important. I always tell my students that you should find an opportunity to teach. When you teach others, you teach yourself.
It really is ironic that the saddest I'd ever been was when I had 'achieved' all the things I had wanted. I was so disgustingly thin, but I was so unhappy.
When you can hear a violinist, that is better than you, then you learn from him, because if you play with somebody who is worse than you, then you go down.
There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'
I can actually see the sound in my head. I can actually see it... But each sound is different so this one has that sparkle, there is a sparkle to the sound.
A talented child will have a schedule that is horrendous. You get up and practice, go to school, practice some more, eat dinner, and then you have homework.
I think it's really important to always kind of stretch your boundaries and your limits and get out of your comfort zone. And for me, that's very important.
Good conductors know when to push and when to lay back. I've known so many great conductors that I'm still doing what I can to learn the craft of this role.
There are very few things that I love more than being on stage and performing, but more than anything, I want to be a positive role model for teenage girls.
I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.
When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.
I use Facebook quite a lot to keep up with my friends, although I had to delete 'Words With Friends' from my phone because it was wasting too much of my time.
There is no earthly reason why a solo string instrument or voice, having the possibility to play or sing pure intonation, should want, or try, to be tempered.
The Violin of my dreams. If you wanna play a pianissimo that is almost inaudible and yet it carries through a hall that seats 3,000 people, there's your Strad.
'Kol Nidrei' is probably the most important prayer in the Jewish religion. It comes on the evening of Yom Kippur. There are so many different renditions of it.
I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.
Girls Who Rocked the World is full of inspiring stories about young women who demonstrate that people of all ages have the power to create change in the world.
The Four Seasons was making me popular in Britain, but EMI America had no interest in making that happen in the States, so I just had a classical career there.
There is no such thing as perfection, there are only standards. And after you have set a standard you learn that it was not high enough. You want to surpass it.
I want to do everything. That's my problem. Life is short, and I hate the idea of turning down anything. You never know what interesting experience might happen.