The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that’s needed.

I could never find out anything about Liszt's teaching methods from Rosenthal, except that it was difficult to persuade Liszt to leave the cafe and go back to the studio for a lesson.

Except for recordings made by famous tenors, the emphasis in classical recording has for the most part recently been on the work, and even more on the composer-the performer being spotlighted as the composer's most accomplished representative.

With the Beethoven sonata project, the emphasis was principally on the music, although Schnabel was considered its greatest exponent.

With the combined benefits of radiation, chemotherapy and liver transplantation, our patients with bile duct cancer now have a much better chance to live longer and enjoy a good quality of life.

It is a rare opportunity to work with a client whose product is so good, is willing to push the envelope creatively, and is this much fun -- we couldn't be happier to be working with the Checkers team.

To comprehend the distaste for modernism, it must be admitted at the start that the greatest works of modernism in all the arts are, much of the time, fundamentally disagreeable when first encountered.

I am suspicious of teachers who claim to have invented the only successful method of bringing out the best in young performers, of theorists who claim to have invented a unique approach to analysis, or of historians who wish to reduce all the developments of the musical style of the past entirely to the determinism of social conditions.

The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.

Stage fright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness... It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense - that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success.