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

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.

Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

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

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.

The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.