Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

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

I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.

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

Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

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