The cello is a hero because of its register – its tenor voice. It is a masculine instrument, whereas the violin is feminine because of its soprano pitch. When the cello enters in the Dvorak Concerto, it is like a great orator.

I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart‘s Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.

There’s a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we’re the only ones who can do ‘A Little Nightmare Music.’

When I came to the United States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 13-year-old, and I played a Mendelssohn Concerto, and it sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a finished product.

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven‘s triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

You get more nervous in front of a lot of people. That’s why, when you play a concerto, you play with a small orchestra, in some place where you don’t feel that it is as important as Carnegie Hall.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a ‘Concerto for Accordion?’

I’m usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It’s the gradual vibration for about ten seconds, and then the chimes of my blue light. It’s just a way to wake gently. It all gently puts me into awake-mode. I play music off of my Sonos playlist. ‘The Rachmaninoff Concerto 3 in D-minor’, 1st movement.

All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone‘s heart strings.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don’t feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that’s all done, trust comes in.

It’s fine with me if people want to applaud between movements of a concerto. It doesn’t bother me – it’s part of performance experience.

I love the name ‘Stella McCartney.’ It’s a beautiful name the way it rolls off the tongue. A couple of years ago, I wrote a cello concerto and used that as the basis for the rhythmic and melodic structure of the main motif of the cello part.

There are many collaborations I’d like to explore. One is to co-write a rap concerto with Eminem.

Even if you’re playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you’ve got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky‘s Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.

Edgar Meyer’s violin concerto was the first piece of contemporary music I worked on in any depth. I was 18 or 19.

I’d forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great. This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else‘s dream.

This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one has ever pretended to equal.