Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

For me, the conductor is a person who interprets along with me, and we interpret things together.

I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot.

Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like.

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.

Conducting is a strange thing to teach. There are very few great conducting teachers, and most great conductors don't teach. Look at Valery Gergiev - what he does is not teachable. A lot of it is on-the-job training, what works and what doesn't work.

I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra - not choreography to the audience.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

I'm having a blast being the music director at the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. It certainly is challenging for me, but I love challenges.

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

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score.

I think you'll always be able to do what your ear tells you.

I used to study 'Hunky Dory' - and be mad that I hadn't figured out anything that cool!

Just because you have developed the craft on your instrument doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to be expressive emotionally on that instrument, or vice versa.

A great conductor is an alchemical force: someone who can absorb the historical weight of a famous melody, the expectations of an audience, and the mercurial brilliance of a host of musicians, and shape them all to his or her interpretative ends.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes.

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna.

If you make a suggestion and [musicians] don't know what you mean, you have to be able to do it yourself. I often sit down on drums and show 'em just exactly what I want. And I do it and then say, "How do you do that?" It's because I know how it looks, I know what I want to hear, and I don't drop or rush any tempo. It ain't in my body, it ain't in my nephew's body.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.