In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn't matter which party is in power; don't you think the capital of India should have a concert hall?
The private sector is growing so incredibly in India, in every city you have industries for whom building a concert hall would be nothing financially. But they just don't do it.
After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.
I think conductors do spend too little time with their orchestras.
Go to the young conductors who are not making it, and you will hear how we shouldn't push ourselves or sell ourselves, how they don't have the right connections and the right opportunities. Well, you can be sure they've had the opportunities.
New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you're going to the center of the world, the lion's den.
It's hard to find an emblem of cultural, national pride that burns as bright as Israel's success in classical music.
The 'New York Times' reviews of my work have been evenly divided - favourable and unfavourable.
New York for a long time was a kind of conductor's graveyard.
I miss the standard of the New York Philharmonic's playing very much. It has certainly been a high point in my life.
I'm really not a party person. I'm in the business of working with 100 people every day, so I don't revel in meeting a roomful of people in my leisure time.
My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.
I feel that the critic and music director should have such a good relationship they can pick up the phone and call each other any time.
I'm a Persian Jew, and we don't speak Hebrew.
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.
Open rehearsals reach people who might not otherwise hear the Philharmonic - people on fixed incomes, people who can't move easily at night, students.
There was an opinion expressed in the newspapers that, after 20 years, maybe the Israel Philharmonic should consider asking me to leave. I thought they might have a point, so I asked my orchestra. They told me overwhelmingly that they wanted me to stay.
The New York Philharmonic is a tremendous opportunity, a great orchestra.
Israel gives the West Bank water twice a week! One way of promoting good would be not to ration water.
An American orchestra doesn't want to play more than it has to. I respectfully disagree with that attitude.
