In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.

I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.