I’m afraid this is me. It is none of my concern how others think of me. I know who I am and if you would use that word – formal – in front of my children they would laugh at you and chase you off. It does not define me. I suppose that when I was much younger, as a young conductor in a world where only veterans were accepted, I was probably trying to seem important just like everyone else my age. I wanted to look like I deserved to be taken into consideration, but a long time has passed since then. Now I am 40 years older than the others while then I was 20 years younger... it certainly has an effect on my personality.

At 82 years old you will start a new collaboration with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. You don’t intend to slow down at all...

No. I have made many friends in the musical field through time. I have celebrated 50 years of activity with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 11 concerts broadcasted on television on New Year’s Eve, 500 concerts in total... I will go to the New York Philharmonic – an orchestra which I love, I will revisit Met – where I conducted for the first time in 1961 – but it has been a long time since then. I will not visit only Munich. I will not forget my friends, I will visit them. They keep inviting me and because they think I can still handle it I will honour these invitations.

Before we started to roll the camera you were talking about conducting and how important it is to learn at first how to follow and then to lead.

As a conductor, I think that I was lucky to have come from a family that did not have everything at hand. This fact made me earn my living in order to go to college. At 18 years old I was a violinist in the Pittsburgh Orchestra. I was pretty good. I attended the evening classes. I was working during the day and in the evening I would go to classes until midnight. All this time I had to learn how to follow. At the Pittsburgh Orchestra we did not have a music director for 3 years so we invited some of the most famous conductors. I learned the trade from the end of their batons. I became a very good pupil. Another experience that helped me was the string quartet where I was the first violin. You interact with colleagues, you don’t really know who follows who, and you don’t really need to. Theoretically the first violin leads. All of these things taught me to follow much better. It was useful later on. As I have worked in an orchestra I know what an instrument performer wants. It wants an adamant conductor. There are two simple rules, but fundamental in conducting – you have to lead, not to preach, and to keep time so that you will be understood by the orchestra. It is as simple as that.

So you don’t waste time with speeches, you make music.

Without choreography. I am just doing my job – conducting. It is obvious that conducting and creating music is much more than that, but this is what an instrument player wants – gestures and explanations as clear as possible regarding his technical and musical performance.

Conductor, violinist and composer – Lorin Maazel in an interview from 2012.

On the day that he turns 84 years old, Lorin Maazel is the ‘Performer of the Day’ on Radio Romania Music. On Thursday, March 6^th, 2014, a portrayal of the American conductor on Arpeggio, presented by Ana Voinescu, from Monday to Friday, at 10:00.