Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

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

Difficult Things

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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 was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone's right. It can't be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "