Eugene Ormandy Quotes

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Mendelssohn never wrote any Water Music. However, he wrote the Scotch Symphony, which is even better, or at least stronger.

I played with the best conductors of the world.

Well, I think the first piece of music I ever heard that I really loved was 'Salome's Dances' by Richard Strauss. I played that 12-inch, 78 record, and I stood up on an ottoman to play it on a big Victrola and I'd just keep playing it and playing it.

I miss the standard of the New York Philharmonic's playing very much. It has certainly been a high point in my life.

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

A symphony is no joke.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

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 loving symphonies. Beethoven is beautiful.

My grandmother got me recordings of the 'Goldberg Variations,' in addition to the 'Brandenburg Concertos,' the Mozart string quartets and Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony.'

Mahler wrote it as the third movement of his Fourth Symphony. I mean the fourth movement of his First Symphony. We play it third. The trumpet solo will be played by our solo trumpet player. It's named 'Blumine,' which has something to do with flowers.

Bizet was a very young man when he composed this symphony, so play it softly.

A lot of people don't know that Beethoven, when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, that second movement, he took eight years to figure that out!

I really like conducting my music in concerts because I'm convinced it's not just for films; it has its own life. It can live far away from the images of the movie.

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

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

I'll never forget the first time I heard Johann Sebastian Bach's 'Partita in E Major' for violin. It was in a late-1980s television commercial, of all things. As a young violinist at the time, it enchanted me - it was so pure, precise, and unadorned.

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

To this day, I adore classical music, and I'm very interested in opera, which I found out later my father was also extremely fond of.

Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.

Western music is Bach, Handel and Schubert. It's good music, cleverly done. As a musician, I can see that.

Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.

I'm a big Beethoven fan, and you'll struggle to find a three-minute song on any of his stuff.