I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it's great. That's what an orchestra should be. It's an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

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.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.

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