Shankar Mahadevan Quotes

Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore.

The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

Music is a nice friend to have around, whether it is just for yourself or for other people. If you can enjoy it, being professional is almost secondary.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.

Yesterday I was playing Beethoven's fifth, because I love that.

I abhor the words 'classical music.' Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.

I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.

I've always liked music since I was younger.

I find myself more genuinely drawn to the essence of Beethoven in Schnabel than I ever have been by anybody.

I grew up loving symphonies. Beethoven is beautiful.

Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.

My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

I've had a wonderful life with music.

Music will never stop - it can never stop. I will continue to sing for my fans till the end of time.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.