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

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.

I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.

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

If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.