Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

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.

In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music (indeed culture in general) is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.