“When I was 11 years old, I wanted to sing Tosca.” — Sondra Radvanovsky

What if you didn't have education for sports? People with a natural inclination for sports, athletes without any kind of education, without any kind of training, they would just be couch athletes instead of the world class Olympians that we have.

Opera - above and beyond anything else - is about the music, and it should be about the music.

I think the power of opera has been shifted from the music to the director, because this is a very visual age that we live in.

I think Chicagoans have a great set of values. You know what I mean? Kindness. Morals. Ethics. People in Chicago do the right thing. If somebody falls on the street, someone will actually stop and help them up. That doesn't happen in certain other cities.