Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

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

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

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

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