Milan Turkovic

"Even though Mozart did not play wind instruments he knew exactly how to write for winds. As with all great composers his knowledge was fabulous. Sometimes less important composers who were wind players didn't write as well for wind instruments as Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn or Weber, who were simply highly professional. I trained myself not to have preferred composers or pieces because there are so many great works of music written in all centuries, and there's so much to discover.

"At the moment I favor a five-year-old instrument made by Heckel in Wiesbaden, the company that worked closely with Richard Wagner. Modern wind instruments age relatively quickly because they have so many technical parts. I own three original instruments that I play as a member of Concentus Musicus.

"I've worked with many conductors. Karl Böhm was probably the last of an old school of conducting that is more or less gone: the dictator type of conductor. Böhm would very seldom take care of questions of precision because he expected that everything would fall in place even without his giving the one-two-three-four. He was considered very old-fashioned but he premiered many important pieces in many cites in the first half of this century. In later years his eyesight was so bad that he couldn't study new works and could only do works he had known for many years.

"One of the most professional, quick, elegant and economical conductors is Sir Neville Marriner, with whom I recorded the two Weber concerti. He has hundreds of records to his credit and when I made this record with him I understood why; he has such high efficiency and yet his work is very musical, what come out is really astonishing, done in very short time. Nikolaus Harnoncourt is probably the conductor I learned the most from about music of the 17th and 18th century. I had absolutely no idea at all about contemporary performance practice of the 18th century. We're all educated in a Romantic way, seeing music through the eyes of our time, which is fine, but with Harnoncourt I learned that you can do this without neglecting the information we have about contemporary performance practice. Casals did the same things about performance practice, by inspiration.

"I recently listened to a performance of Traviata at the Vienna Opera. This man Verdi came up with the most simple melodies, the most simple accompaniment, and created such great moments with it. Two weeks ago I listened to Placido Domingo sing Otello; it was astonishing for me to realize the greatness and the simplicity of this music. Verdi's simplicity very often has to do with the surroundings in which it was created. Last summer my wife and I went to Rigoletto at the Verona open-air stage. It's a popular feast: 30,000 people are there enjoying drinks and food. It's very relaxed; opera is performed in a very popular setting for the people -- even those who have no idea about music.

"People who know me just from the stage would think that I'm a very serious, one-sided person but I love telling jokes, I love good living, I adore good food. I don't like to be seen so much as 'the bassoonist'; I want to be seen as a musician who does a lot of other things. Recently I wrote an article for the most important Austrian paper. I'm about to write a book about music for people who are not musicians. I try to see music within the context of the life that surrounds us and from the angle that music lovers see, rather than from the musicians' standpoint.

"It means a whole lot to be an Artist Member of the Society. New York is very choosy and I'm lucky to perform here quite frequently. The most interesting factor is to be the only non-American player within a group. That means a total change of musical climate for me when I travel over from Europe. Also, since the events of the Nazi regime in Austria -- which was swallowed by Hitler's Germany from 1938 to 1945 -- we have lost most of our Jewish musicians in Vienna, and here I have the chance to play with lots of Jewish musicians, something we terribly miss. It's not a question of quality -- you will find excellent musicians among all ethnic groups in the world -- but it's a special, indescribable character of music-making. Any language will have its own inflection; every ethnic group will have a very special way of treating music. For some reason, ninety percent of all the great violin players in the world are Jewish. Nobody has answered the question why; it's just a fact. Some Jewish musicians came back to Vienna, but basically we lost them after World War II, and I found them again here in New York."

Ideal person to have dinner with tonight:

"Clearly only one: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, absolutely. He must have been such a crazy, wonderful person, also quite stubborn and difficult. That would have been most interesting!"