Conductors are performers.

This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off – what more can I say?

When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn’t walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don’t have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where “now” actually is.

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there’s been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that’s associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you’d go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you’d learn to sing a lot of songs.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that’s something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That’s the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.