I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
I did 500 shows of ‘Chaula Devi’ and 700 shows of ‘Anarkali’. I never mixed the filmy style with classical arts and kept my stage performances pure and it was appreciated.
I come from a classical background.
I did classical singing at school. I did exams in that. I’d sing soprano, and we’d sing in German; we’d do Schubert for my pieces, in Latin, French… I really enjoyed that. I kind of miss it.
I never went into acting to do film. I went into it to do theatre – classical roles.
I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.
I’m a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.
I have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there’s always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun.
It was not a secret, then or now, that there is something vaguely un-American about forcing your child to be really good at classical music performance.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
That’s the thing – you do a job like ‘Shameless,’ and suddenly that’s why you can get a job like ‘The Virgin Queen’, not because of all the classical theatre you’ve done. But we can be very snippy about television. It’s absolutely the most potent and powerful form of storytelling we have.
In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms – the complexity of rhythms.
My older brother Mike is an excellent trumpet player. By the time he was 12, he was playing around Kansas City in classical situations. He was already an amazing talent.
I’ve studied classical singing, but not to a great extent.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.
I had learnt Kathak for six years from the age of eight and did a foundation course from Kathak Kendra in Delhi. I was not fond of classical dance, but today, I’m glad my mom made me do it.
We listen to a lot of classical and a lot of jazz, and so you get some funky notes here and there. And we get a little experimental in some of the deeper tracks.
I like all kinds of music – classical, pop, rock, electronic.
If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that’s because that’s where I’m going to find inspiration.
I probably have the most versatile playlist in the world, from country to rap to classic rock to classical.
I’ve fallen in love with the classical world of imagery, and what I’d like to do now over the last bit of my life is to photograph some nudes.
Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.
The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar – to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
I’ve always had a close connection to both rock and classical music.
While classical mechanics correctly predicts the behavior of large objects such as tennis balls, to predict the behavior of small objects such as electrons, we must use quantum mechanics.
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.
It’s almost died, classical dance.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
It’s important that the art forms communicate, whether it’s the dance program with the jazz program or the classical program with the opera program, that these conversations becomes fluid.
It’s funny: when I was a kid, my mom would reorganize the record collection all the time. She’d have classical, she’d have Celtic, she’d have rock and roll, and then she’d have female singers. And I don’t like it that female singers are their own genre.
I keep myself open to singing in different genres like classical dance songs, light classical folk, etc. There’s so much to learn and I’m glad I’m on the right path.
As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it’s Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.
There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there’s a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I’m approaching the Lear hoop.
You’re now getting a new breed of people like Il Divo and Andrea Bocelli and I think that’s why people feel less intimidated by classical music than they once did.
I have three siblings. My sister makes music. My older brother is a classical conductor, and my younger brother is a mixing engineer.
It’s not that people don’t like classical music. It’s that they don’t have the chance to understand and to experience it.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like ‘Indian classical music’ and ‘ragas,’ and all of that’s new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating – one doesn’t know where to begin sometimes.
There’s a great energy and drive that takes precedence in a lot of rock and pop. It’s about making a strong visceral connection. That’s something that I think great classical music can have, too.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.
I think differently, I think it’s about reaching everybody on every different plane and every different level, and if I could remix the song and do a dance remix, that’s great. If I could do a classical version, that’ll be great too. It’s all just about expression.
I believe that classical music comes through listening and practice, and it can be fun both for the singer or performer and the listener or audience, as long as the performer is taught to recognise the pulse of the audience.
I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema – some actors don’t like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.
I like reading and writing, and I am a trained classical dancer.
I was raised in an Indian household – singing classical music and eating south Indian food. But the second I went to school, it was a different world. I’d be listening to Destiny’s Child, Usher and the Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t until college that I really found the balance between the two worlds.
There was a period when I’d just come out of college where I’d been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
In the world of classical ballet there are only a handful of story ballets, so getting a new one is cause for excitement.
Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation – these kinds of things I find oppressive.
When K. Vishwanath made the film ‘Shankarabharanam,’ he wanted to bring back Carnatic classical music to mainstream. It’s popularity was waning in those days.
I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I thought classical music was corny.
I’ve always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.
Our first show, ‘A Little Nightmare Music,’ encompasses a lot of zany humor with beautiful classical music.
