Symphony Orchestras Quotes

No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.

It's a wonderful thing to play with symphony orchestras - I've played with many - but it's really special in Israel because you have so many great musicians.

I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.

Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.

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.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

I'm thankful to Deutsche Grammophon, our partners - we are going to record the complete Shostakovich symphonies and hopefully some other things as well.

I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.

Over the years it has been my privilege to lead performances with Saint Louis, the National Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and so many other wonderful organizations.

Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.

The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.