Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" '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. "

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

" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "

" What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset. "

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

" The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest. "

" 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. "

" It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks. "

" As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?' "

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

Difficult Things

" Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable. "

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

" The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around. "

" Always the journey, never the destination. "

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

" I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music. "

" As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We're insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it's a case of besser wissen - we know better. That's very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you're doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England. "

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

" My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people. "