The Germans are prisoners of their past.

Germany will never be a real, free thinking and free feeling friend of Israel, because it will always fall under this shadow.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

I have heard Ori Kam on several occasions over the last few years and have always been deeply impressed with his playing. He possesses a rare combination of musical talent, technical facility, intelligence, and charisma, and he is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary young artists I have heard in recent years.

I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.

And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear.

European anti-Semitism goes much further back than to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948. It even goes further back than the Holocaust.