Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.

If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."

Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.

Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.