Semyon, we are doing this interview for your 70th birthday. Do you see that as a milestone? Or as a chance for retrospection?
I already noticed a few decades ago that birthdays that end with a zero don’t mean anything. Life afterwards is just as it was before, and the changes take place in between. I remember talking with my father, who was nearing the end of his life. “Dad”, I said, “I still feel like I’m fifteen. Isn’t that odd?” And my father answered: “No. It’s the same with me.”
Read the full Czech Philharmonic in-house magazine interview here