Quotes About Conducting

I can't even touch another conductor's baton. The center of gravity, the feel of the handle, puts me totally off.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

I'm now doing three things: concerts, conducting, and teaching, and they each support each other. I learn to see things from different perspectives and listen with different ears. The most important thing that you need to do is really listen.

But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting becomes a great deal easier. You don't have battles like you had before.

The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.

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.

On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.

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.

conducting in a church in London where, he said,

It is the misfortune of those who are concerned in conducting human affairs that, however pure and capacious their own conceptions may be, they must accommodate themselves to the circumstances with which they are environed and use the instruments that are within their reach.

A conductor should guide rather than command.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

It was great to do August Rush and have all the challenges of playing that character, especially the American accent for the first time and also playing the guitar and the conducting I had to do.

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.

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.

Being a director or a conductor is a balance of many things. And to do it right is a very difficult tightrope to walk. I've come to the conclusion that there's really no way to be one hundred percent popular as conductor.

Sometime between four o'clock and dawn, Bernstein returned home with a hangover. At nine in the morning, he was awakened by a phone call from the Philharmonic's associate manager who told him, "Well, this is it. You have to conduct at three o'clock. No chance of a rehearsal. You will report at a quarter of three backstage.

Look at the score and make it come alive as if [you] were the composer. If you can do that, you're a conductor and if you can't, you're not. If I don't become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm conducting their works, then it won't be a great performance.

I have so much regard for the art of conducting. It's easy to look not so good up there.

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.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

In my imagination yes, I remember, when I was six years old, I was conducting all this concert in my house. But now it's real.