44 Quotes by Charles Hazlewood

When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.

I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!

Even if you're playing the most well-known repertoire under the sun, I still believe you have a responsibility as an artist to tell the audience why you're playing it, what are the key aspects to it, and then throw in a bit about its historical context.

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal.

In America, they have this nauseating habit of calling the conductor 'maestro'. I always slightly gag when the cor anglais player goes, 'Maestro, can I discuss bar 19 with you?'

It's wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.

Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

[As a conductor] there has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.