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" 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. "

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" I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been. "

" The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it. "

" Oh Lord... I don't really do pride. "

" As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again? "

" Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young. "

" I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano. "

" 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. "

" 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 you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble. "

" Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds. "

" I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach. "

" I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy. "

" I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession. "

" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief. "

Difficult Things

" We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music. "

" I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it. "

" 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. "

" Always the journey, never the destination. "

" The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation. "

" 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. "

" I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony. "

" Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt. "

" I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor. "

" Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians. "

" American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious. "

" With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together. "