I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.
Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.
I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
After Bruno Walter, my career went in leaps and bounds. I have had 35 years of a career that is just incredible, and a wonderful time all over the world.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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.
Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.
I first came to Abbey Road Studios in 1994. I scored 'Little Women' there. What I remember most about it was how hard it was to come to London from Los Angeles and conduct when you're jetlagged.
I did the one concert, and I was not bitten by the conducting bug, and I thought I was done, but then the phone started to ring, and gradually, over time, I started conducting more and more. Now a third of my performances are with orchestras.
I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
Musical practice is too young an art in America to warrant a search for men with a conductor's gift.
I hope always to be busy, even if only directing an orchestra in the pit. However, I should prefer to produce movies or be the directing head of a radio corporation.
I'm a band dictator.
It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are constantly compared. I think that 's a good thing.
I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.
I think the best publicity I can get for my music is to conduct it.
I feel too young in 2018 to take over the Berlin Philharmonic as the successor to Simon Rattle.
I love orchestrating music and conducting and being on Broadway.
I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.
I just wish, maybe, that I'd started conducting earlier. I was about 40 when I started. Apart from that I don't really have any regrets. Is that bad?
Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.
Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
