Performance Leadership Quotes

The conductor is the artistic leader and sometimes cultural arbiter of his or her community. It is their leadership that is looked to and should anything go wrong, they are the persons taking most of the heat.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.

A good stand-up, you lead the audience. You don't kowtow to the audience. Sometimes the audience is wrong. I always think the audience is wrong.

Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.

I'm a band dictator.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

I think, as an actor, and particularly if you are playing the lead in something, you have to view yourself as the head of department for the cast. All of the other departments are accountable and have somebody at the helm who is leading them all the time, and I don't think that the actors should be any different.