You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.

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.

I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.

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.

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.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.