Laurence Equilbey famous quotes

The most important thing for the conductor is that he or she listens. Her listening will make things sound a certain way. If the conductor listens well, the musicians listen each other better. The conductor can in effect impose a certain kind of listening for everybody.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Listening #Important #Musician

I'm more authoritarian with the orchestras than I used to be. You need to hold your ground, I've noticed, or you'll be swept aside.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Needs #Orchestra #Used

With a group of people, it's easer to say, I want this, this and this. It's different with the soloists, because they are the ones who will be in the spotlight. You can't force an interpretation on them. With soloists, it's all about diplomacy.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#People #Groups #Different

Like many musicians, I can hear the weight in the sound. Sound is matter. We speak of the colour of an instrument, of transparency... We can demand more sombre or lighter colours, deeper playing and singing, heavier or lighter sound. And manipulating those means is like creating a painting.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Mean #Creating #Singing

There's a spectrum of possibilities. You can underline the bass, or not at all. You can create something that is well-anchored or that is floating and never arriving. You can make a melodic line dominant or barely visible. The conducting gesture is akin to painting or sculpture.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Arriving #Floating #Sculpture

Musicians ought to reclaim some of the power in the houses of production. The opera houses are run either by managers or by stage directors, never by musicians.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Running #House #Musician

I think the classical music is on a dangerous downward slope, because it's not seeking strong enough resonance with its society.
-- Laurence Equilbey

#Strong #Thinking #Enough

I'm a bit of an insomniac. I go to bed at 5am because I get caught up in watching TV or listening to music at night.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

John Coltrane - I've been listening to the 'Trane again. It blows you away, because I know more now and I hear more now and I had a life that I've lived!

When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.