I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time - particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart - rediscover them - and you must.

I used to set myself little challenges to make the work more interesting.

It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?

The thing is that I'm naturally curious about a lot of different disciplines in music, and I enjoy doing them. And as long as people are nice enough to let me, I'll keep on trying.

Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.

I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.

There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.

I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.

The extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn’t true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance – whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.