What appeals to me about an American music directorship is the involvement of the conductor with the orchestra and the community. I think that's a fantastic thing. In Europe, being principal conductor means merely that you're the person who does most of the concerts. For me, that simply isn't enough.
There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'
I played cello in my high school orchestra.
I went to this little performing arts school in downtown Phoenix. You had to dance or act, and everyone sang in choir. I started out playing the saxophone, but I always wanted to be in an orchestra. That was a dream as a kid, and there aren't a lot of saxophones in an orchestra.
If 'ecstasy' means to stand outside ourselves, then what better ambition can there be as we wait in the wings of the Royal Albert Hall: to leave self-obsession behind and take the audience on a journey across the high wire of Beethoven or the flying trapeze of Liszt.
But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.
There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.
Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This might be a harsh judgment, but it could easily happen that orchestras could slowly atrophy.
Bernstein was everywhere - Vienna, London - and everyone admired him. Of course he loved Boston, and he did so many great things at Tanglewood. He was the best example of what a conductor should be.
Next year I'm going to be a guesting soloist with orchestras all over Europe, to start off with.
There are three orchestras in Munich, all world-quality, in a city of one million. Yet every hall is full.
As a trumpet player, I was playing Xenakis, Lindberg: very challenging, technical, atonal, and I enjoyed it.
I sometimes feel it is to my disadvantage that I have not conducted the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston or Chicago symphonies, but then I have had to sacrifice something in order to have enough time with my orchestras.
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
I guess really what my goal is is just to enlarge the violin repertoire.
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 love doing concert music.
An American orchestra doesn't want to play more than it has to. I respectfully disagree with that attitude.
When facing symphonic orchestras which have played some works five thousands times, you have nothing to do.
One other hobby of mine has been playing the oboe but I have not kept this up after 1969.
I've been lucky to conduct the very best orchestras in the world: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, the London Philharmonic.
The Boston Symphony is one of the best orchestras in the world and has such a great tradition - which I want to cherish, of course, and to learn from and to continue and to add whatever I can add.
Violin playing is a physical art with great traditions behind it.
Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.
What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do.
