Words matter. These are the best Simon Rattle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.
Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.
The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.
I’ve always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians – we don’t listen to our own music for relaxation.
Beethoven was always too much. He’s not slightly anything – he’s very everything.
I’ve always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.
Orchestras are like people. They’re the sonic embodiment of their community.
The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.
There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it’s not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.
I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.
It’s interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.
Oh Lord… I don’t really do pride.
Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.
We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.
What really counts isn’t whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it’s your mindset.
I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it.
There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they’ve done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.
The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.
We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn’t just be high priests of music.
‘Pelleas et Melisande’ is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.
Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.
I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.
I’d be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.
Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.
‘Parsifal’ is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
I believe if you’re not completely in love with what you’re doing, you’d better find another profession.
With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven’t started three years before, I’m screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.
As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles’ question, ‘Will you still need me when I’m 64?’
‘Career’ is not a musical term.
My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I’m not a great conductor.
