Daniel Barenboim

It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.

It's a wonderful profession, and it opens lots of doors, and I think it's quite right that people can accuse actors and actresses of being dilettante, but you learn on every job, whatever it is, the process moves you on in some way, and yeah, I want to expand my knowledge of our existence, I suppose.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.