Lorin Maazel quotes

“You encourage, you push and pull. You look out at your colleagues and say, 'Yes, you can.' To bring [performers] past the limitations of their own potential is leadership. All fine leaders conducting from the podium have that. Emotion is what it's all about. Music-making without emotion and passion is nothing. I'm never looking for a perfect performance, I'm looking for an impassioned performance.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“The collaboration with the musicians of the New York Philharmonic is sheer joy. The Orchestra is so professional, so prepared, so motivated. I float from day to day, concert to concert, masterpiece to masterpiece, supported by the sound of the New York Philharmonic.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“I think I infuse the music with a new passion. Part of this is because I have fallen in love: I am in love with the New York Philharmonic. The chemistry has just been right. Beyond expectation.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“Art rises above and beyond the issues of the day. It reunites what has been rent asunder, not along national or religious lines, but along individual, human ones. It heals, redefines goals, and strengthens the resolve to move on, to rebuild, to reconstruct. However obtuse human behavior is in other arenas, art, if not suborned, can clarify, put into perspective and re-inspire.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“Salzburg was where he was born and where he was rejected.”

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“Salzburg was where he was born and where he was rejected. I don't think he was capable of writing a boring bar of music.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“Why does Beethoven appeal and continue to appeal? Other than the obvious (his having written great music), Beethoven communicates a credo so effectively that the listener finds the courage he needs to reaffirm his own belief in the purpose of life. Beethoven stiffens the fiber of our commitment in a language that is beauty itself, in a statement as open as a Greek temple. Friend Beethoven is the one friend we shall always have.”

Lorin Maazel quote

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“We are doing a program this season of music by Schubert, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel, music which is totally -- on paper -- incompatible,”

Lorin Maazel quote

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