Andris Nelsons Quotes

You're a constant student, as a musician.

My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.

I first fell in love with music when I was a little boy. When I first heard music, I felt the beauty in it. Then, being able to tap along on a table top and box was great, but my favorite thing to do was to watch records spin. I would almost get hypnotized by it. These things are what drew me in initially.

A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you're playing is music that's been here for years. And all you're trying to do is improve upon it when you play.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

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.

Before you start a practicing regimen, you have to be aware that the study of music is a lifelong process-it's a discipline. And the key to mastering any discipline is consistency.

I figure I'm a mandolin player first and foremost, and everything else I've accomplished is just a scam.

I played piano for a lot of my childhood and stupidly quit. I wish I hadn't - I could have been a great classical pianist!

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

The most perfect melodic shapes are found in Mozart; he has the lightness of touch which is the true objective ... Listen to the remarkable expansion of a Mozart melody, to Cherubino's 'Voi che sapete', for instance. You think it is coming to an end, but it goes farther, even farther.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!

I'd studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

I used to be a folk singer, but I was... dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.

I'm 33...before AC/DC I've played in a lot of bands in Australia. You're never too old to rock and roll.

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.