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.
My parents came a long time ago to Vienna, met in Vienna. Of course they had to go through a lot also, but we're very happy to have our home in Vienna.
My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.
I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them.
Consider the word “time.” We use so many phrases with it. Pass time. Waste time. Kill time. Lose time. In good time. About time. Take your time. Save time. A long time. Right on time. Out of time. Mind the time. Be on time. Spare time. Keep time. Stall for time. There are as many expressions with “time” as there are minutes in a day. But once, there was no word for it at all. Because no one was counting. Then Dor began. And everything changed.
Chelsea was the most difficult time. In the middle of the season, I already knew that I wouldn't play again, because the club had decided I wouldn't play. It was a frustrating decision because I felt rather good, and I thought that I could contribute something.
The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.
Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.
I understood I had to be good at school so I could play football in my free time. Usually, by the time I came home from school, I already had all my things ready for the next day, so I could put my bag on the side and go straight out to play football with my friends!
Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity.
To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.
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.
If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.
Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use.
Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.
Depending on whom you ask, time is money, time is love, time is work, time is play, time is enjoying friends, time is raising children, and time is much more. Time is what you make of it.