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.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

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.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

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

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