I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music.

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.

Israel's strategy cannot be to constantly confront the Palestinians with the history of the Holocaust, but instead to show them that Israel is a reality.

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.

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.

There are probably many people in Israel who believe that Wagner, who died in 1883, lived in Berlin in 1942 and was friends with Hitler.