Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.