Eric Ericson

By the time we'd had him for a week, Simon Rattle and I both had hundreds of books full of notes of how we could improve our choirs, and every single one of those techniques worked, but completely differently.

One year later, we had Eric Ericson come from, uh, Sweden, and we gave him the Verdi Requiem, and the choir knew it well, and he simply conducted with very small gestures, looked at the choir, did this.

In other words, will you listen? Looked vaguely disappointed, um, and they sang like gods for him.

Um, and at the end of five days with him, Simon and I had not a single note in our books because the presence of Eric Erickson in the rehearsal room, not even giving them any technical advice, but just guiding the music and being faintly disappointed in everybody, um, was something that you couldn't learn a single thing from beyond the fact that Eric Erickson was much better than we were.