The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.

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.

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

Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.

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

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

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.