Leonard Bernstein Quotes

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.

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

All the conductor has to do is stand back and try not to get in the way. Mozart is doing all the work.

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people.

See, I have two selves in me - a musician and a composer.

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.

My mother was an opera singer and my father is a clarinet player, composer and conductor.

At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.

I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading.

It's been a thrilling journey - I have had to really learn that an orchestra is an entity - it's a creature. I have been calling it the dragon and the conductor is the dragon tamer. And you just have to... ride and don't let go and you will be fine.

Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

I'm an interpreter of music.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I'm a little less hungry as an actor than I used to be. When you're a director, you're the conductor of the orchestra, and when you're an actor, you're playing the violin. There's a thrill to each of them, but as the conductor, you get the fuller sound.

On Ain't No Telling I came up with the bass solo.

I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

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