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As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.

It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.

Classical music is something that we're very passionate about, but we always thought it was presented in a stuffy way.

Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.

But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis.