Music does not live until it's interpreted - with all of its flaws, mannerisms, etc. It needs to be incarnated to be something.
The piece of music is nothing without the act of interpretation. That is the only way it can live, and it's a totally abstract thing.
My belief is that the music is always stronger than the performer: there is always something new, something we learn, whether at a performance or during a rehearsal.
When we work on a piece of music, we'll often read the biographies of the composer and learn about what was going on historically and artistically. But I believe that the connection to a piece of music is something much more personal and mysterious than all of these bits of information.
We cannot underestimate the power of the different art forms, and the correspondences between them, which are an unending source of inspiration and enrichment.
There's always the syndrome of the parent-child relationship: when someone has known you since you were very young, it doesn't matter how much more independent, how much older or more mature you get - there is still that element, the dynamic of the relationship that is very hard to successfully transform, and that has nothing to do with the music-making, in the end.
It's so interesting, you know, whenever you read the accounts of composers playing their own music, that they had very different priorities than performers. None of them seemed too concerned about the plastic realization of their music.
