Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.

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.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.