A good conductor ought to be a good chauffeur; the qualities that make the one also make the other. They are concentration, an incessant control of a… - Sergei Rachmaninoff

It is as a composer that his name will live longest. He was the last of the colourful Russian masters of the late 19th cent[ury], with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent.

I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.

Although it may seem incredible, this cure helped me. At the beginning of the summer I began to compose... New musical ideas began to stir with me-far more than I needed for my concerto. By the autumn I had finished the Adagio and Finale... The Two movements I played... at a charity concert... They had a gratifying success... By the Spring I had finished the first movement of the concerto... Out of gratitude, I dedicated it to Nikolay Dahl.