A remarkable interview with Sir Colin Davis in the Guardian, a portion of it here:
Davis tells me he has spent a lifetime fighting a battle. Not against orchestras, managers, or musicians, but against his ego. "One's ego becomes less and less interesting as you get older, to oneself and to everyone else. I have been around it too long."The less ego you have, the more influence you have as a conductor. And the result is that you can concentrate on the only things that really matter: the music and the people who are playing it. You are of no account whatever. But if you can help people to feel free to play as well as they can, that's as good as it gets."
A little later in the article is this secret:
"All you have to do is learn how to listen," he says in his soft-focused sotto voce, which makes everything he says sound like the revelation of a closely guarded secret. "If you listen to the music, it will tell you what it's trying to do. If you try and interfere with it in some way, if you come with some theory about how it goes, then you're in for trouble. You just have to allow the music to flow. So if you can set it off right at the beginning, then you've got nothing more to do."
It sounds so easy, doesn't it?
Timothy Banks says