Laura Mvula Quotes

I love doing concert music.

I think that's one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It's that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it's supposed to be. To me it's the same, it doesn't make any difference.

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

I've seen the Mass For The End Of Time in concert but my brother's the more musical one really.

We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved.

To me, there is nothing like the excitement and unique experience of a live orchestra playing.

I used to lie in bed and imagine I was performing at the Albert Hall, not that I'd ever been there. I took lessons with a German teacher when I was quite young. But it turned out I had a very high soprano voice, which I didn't like at all.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was 'The Rite of Spring.' That's what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.

I played cello in my high school orchestra.

I was trained on piano - that was part of grade school and high school.

I regularly go to concerts with my children sharing the music.

The world of classical music is so fascinating. It's a world that encompasses people from everywhere and erases the basic restraints of nationality; everyone is united by this common language of music.

I trained at Juilliard so that I could do all kinds of genres, so that's what I'm trained to do.

I don't know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised; it's made to please the largest audience possible. I also compose to please a large audience, but when you listen to my music, you understand that I have studied and applied the whole history of composition.

When I was just coming up, I always wanted to be able to perform to a large crowd with a symphony.

It's a wonderful thing to play with symphony orchestras - I've played with many - but it's really special in Israel because you have so many great musicians.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

If anything, when I was young, I wanted to be an orchestra.

That was my first love growing up - classical orchestral music, especially Impressionism.

I first started playing the violin at 6. And then at 7, it was piano. So from then it was just classical music like every day.

I started with very tonal 19th-century music because I wanted to be a violinist as a child. So this was my first music, and then I was very much influenced by Stravinsky and Shostakovich in the 1950s. But I was starting to develop my own style.

I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.

I am a singer, first and foremost, but the medium happens to be the cello.