Bennett Cerf Quotes

New Year's Eve, we're going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section.

When I do concerts and recitals, the two most common requests are spirituals and opera.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

We'll open for anyone, we are just looking to play.

I love live music and I love to see people's faces when I'm performing.

I'm planning a different show, though for obvious reasons some of the material will be the same, and of course I will perform material from the new CD.

A big part of my love and passion for making music is playing it live.

We really put together a great band, and have a great time.

Night after night I could feel the chills go up and down my spine, they played so well.

I'm very proud of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

We built a bit of an audience at our university in Cambridge, playing Beethoven and Mozart quartets.

Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.

My favorite aspect of music is the performance part!

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it's Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

I love to play gigs.

As many times as I have done 'Marriage of Figaro,' I have never been able to ask Mozart what he intended in this piece.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

Through the years I've found that I prefer live playing to recording. I still do lots of recording - but I treasure the live shows.

I also work with the regular orchestras in Munich, Germany and other similar orchestras.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

We play some of my stuff and we play some Beatle covers.

Y'know, you can't please all the people all the time... and last night, all those people were at my show.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

Concert repertoire is some of the most beautiful music ever written, and I frequently seek out opportunities to perform it.

Not necessarily in one concert, but they're all there to be used if you want to use them.