Generally I think American orchestras have done a lot more educational outreach than the European orchestras, although Europe has been catching up very fast. Ten years ago in Frankfurt I don’t think there was any notion of a concert in which you talked from the stage and you were trying to appeal to young adults or parents with their kids. Now it’s a huge part of what we do. Yet all that was already on the radar screen when I was growing up in America because of the Leonard Bernstein young people’s concerts. My first job at the National Symphony in was to do sometimes close to 100 young people’s concerts in a season. We turned them out with American efficiency like a factory – two concerts a day, five days a week! We would play for 20,000 school children in a week, busing them into the big Kennedy Centre concert hall. I don’t think any European orchestras were doing that back then. But there has been a huge sea-change. All the London orchestras are hugely involved in education.

I always have had a big commitment to music education. I started doing some teaching at the Juilliard School last year, and I’ve worked with the Juilliard Orchestra a lot over the past few seasons. I just love that. You find that the minds of the young generation are completely open to anything you might suggest about style, or trying to understand the meaning of the music. They are so often taught what to do with their left hand, what to do with their right hand, and not what the music means, who the composer was, what the world is like now and what the world was like then. Gosh, is that ever missing in music education! So it’s really fun to work with kids and help them with that.

Teaching is so directed at mastering technique and repertoire. But I remember even when I was growing up, I wasn’t encouraged to think, “What was the social context of this Brahms sonata? Why does it sound the way it does? What was he trying to say? What did people think of it when it was new?’ More and more I find that’s really important to me in determining a performance.