44 Quotes by Charles Hazlewood

I'd like to explode a few myths about what we call classical music. It's not high art for the titillation of a chosen few.

Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.

I most definitely would not buy the 'Daily Mail,' which pours a kind of livid torpor into the eyelids of the average Brit - I skimmed through a copy recently and couldn't believe the rubbish in it.

It's Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony I'm really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.

Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.

The way Fatboy Slim layers motifs is the same as 18th-century baroque counterpoint. You have an idea, then you have an answer to the idea in another voice, then you have a counter idea accompanying the original idea, and you build up your texture like that. I'm really into Kruder and Dorfmeister at the moment, and they do the same thing.

I want to prove that Holst's 'The Planets' can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting.

Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.

I spend so much of my time working away, but I love being here. My family is in Somerset, and this is where my heart is.