What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.

Sometimes if you have very confident people, you have to tell them please, be polite, there are other players are good enough as you and you should never speak out of an orchestra.

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.

And like the old stereotype, I overcame my shyness by making my friends laugh.

And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.