WHERE HE'S BEEN AND WHERE HE'S GOING: After recent debuts with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra and Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra, Thielemann continues his worldwide tour, including performances in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minnesota.

HIS MUSICAL PASSIONS: Why so much Schumann? "Past conductors often thought Schumann's symphonies needed to be retouched, because they thought of him more as a composer of piano pieces, songs, and chamber music than of symphonies. His madness did not help matters, because once a composer gets labeled, people don't listen to his music with open ears any more. Some musicians thought he made mistakes in orchestration, but that's how people saw Mahler once, in the days when the Vienna Philharmonic refused to play his music. In fact, like Mahler, Schumann knew exactly what he wanted."

Hans Pfitzner is another composer that Thielemann's crazy about. "There is no such ambiguity about Pfitzner's music; for me its appeal is precisely in the composer's art of instrumentation. Pfitzner's orchestral sound can be modern and conservative at the same time. He can be as radical as Richard Strauss's opera "Elektra," but with an internal grace. Pfitzner's three preludes from his opera "Palestrina" are very melodic and accessible. He used so many colors, and even had a bitter sense of humor!"

What about more popular music, like your recent recording of CARMINA BURANA? "It's a work of operatic scale. I'd love to see it in a film version. In fact, the director Götz Friedrich staged a version of it at the Berlin Opera. CARMINA BURANA has such strong colors, it brings the Middle Ages to life with a strange combination of brutal vulgarity and refinement."

WHY HE DOES WHAT HE DOES: "Because as a youngster I heard Herbert von Karajan's recording of "Tristan und Isolde" and thought, I want to do that. I began to study the piano, and at home we had Helmut Walcha's recording of Bach's organ music. I was fascinated by the sheer power of Bach's music, which is both romantic and baroque at the same time. Bach wasn't the weakling some performers portray him as; he fathered 20 children, after all. Yet if you admit to liking a romantic interpretation of Bach, like Willem Mengelberg's conducting of the 'St. Matthew Passion,' some people crucify you!"

MAJOR INFLUENCES: "I enjoy listening to recordings by Furtwängler, Toscanini, and Klemperer, but I choose very carefully what I listen to, especially if I am preparing a particular piece. I think one must leave one's own fingerprint and find one's own style. I admire Furtwängler's ideas in sound, but I also respect John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. When you listen to Furtwängler conduct Schubert's Ninth Symphony or Schumann's Fourth Symphony, you can sense a lot of poetry and atmosphere between the notes. When I first conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, which has a great tradition of maestros like Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, it was like a love affair. We understood each other almost without words."

WHAT HE DOES WHEN HE'S NOT ON THE PODIUM: Thielemann takes walks in the countryside to clear his mind, and voraciously reads about the history of Berlin, architecture, furniture, and many other subjects. When in New York he makes a beeline for the latest Broadway musicals, which refresh him from his diet of all-classical sounds: "Otherwise, as we say in German, you're cooking in your own juice too much. Once you get away from what you are accustomed to, then you can have fresh ideas."