My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.
I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.
In 'Secret Life of Pets,' it's a huge orchestra - really, really big.
We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.
I love horns, and the bigger the band, the better it sounds to my ear.
My music was typically continental - nothing like, say, The Beatles.
Classical music is this music that was written by a bunch of dead people a long time ago.
The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.
I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.
This is no condemnation of Chuck Berry, who I greatly admire. But Chuck Berry's music will not translate as well to orchestration because of its very three-chord rock 'n' roll nature. It is the music of the artists that are more pretentious, pompous or closer to the kind of big dramatic stylings that orchestras are good with.
It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.
Serious music usually doesn't pay.
The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.
There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.
Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility.
As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was in my genes. Plus, American music has always been close to my own aesthetic, because of the mix of symphonic music with jazz.
For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.
I'm everything I'm made of. So a part of me is made of classical music. I'm grateful for it.
I'm sure the atmosphere at Tanglewood and the space there and nature - I think it absolutely fits Wagner's music.
Today's symphonic music is sponsored by the upper structures of society.
In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
Please write music like Wagner, only louder.
I think every classically trained film composer feels to some extent, maybe on some level, that they took the low road, that they could have maybe pursued a career in the concert music world, and perhaps been involved in a higher quality of music.
I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.
Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.
