Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every orchestra has its own sound.
Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt.
Oh Lord... I don't really do pride.
Always the journey, never the destination.
It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.
I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.
Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.
Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.
Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.
Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community.
I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.
Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.
The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.
I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.
What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.
If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble.
As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?
I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.
I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.
I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.
I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession.
I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him.
Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.
'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?'
The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation.
I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.
Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians.
You don't like Liverpool: you either loathe it or you love it. And I don't know anyone who loathes it and comes from it.
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
If you receive a whole string of bad reviews, you have to say, 'O.K., maybe there's something here we should pay attention to.'
My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor.
The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.
Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.
There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it's not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.
Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.
In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.
I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only.
The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.