At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

If every school would hire two more music teachers, we would need two fewer police officers.

What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.