My own work in composition has been on the back burner for some years now. Ever since my youngest son was born four years ago, I haven't been able to spend time writing music with a good conscience. Composing for me is terribly exhausting and very time consuming. There's something about the process which is - well, I relate to how people like Sibelius suffered with composition; how every piece was a kind of birthing process - that's really the way it feels to me.

Perhaps I have a kind of sympathy to composers in general that wouldn't exist if I wasn't also a composer. Hopefully, that helps me to do better justice to their works as a conductor. Nevertheless, I am still searching for, and waiting for, a piece of music written during the last 50 years which can be considered as great as the multitudes of masterpieces written before that.