CJ Replay: What Are the “Most Important Pieces?”

In an conversation with famed conductor Eric Ericson published in the Choral Journal, interviewer William Wyman asked, “If you were advising a choral director as to what you felt were the important pieces that he or she should be attempting to study and perform, what might some of those pieces be?”

 

Ericson’s reply:  “It is most important to have any experience in different style periods. I love some music from the 15th century such as works by Okeghem, Obrecht and later Dufay. And, in the Renaissance, learn one of the important masses of Palestrina. And, I emphasize Monteverdi because of the richness of different styles within him. His Vespro della Beata Vergine might be prepared by doing a lot of madrigals of Gesualdo and Monteverdi until you have an approach to the larger work. I certainly enjoy all of the marvelous mad.rigals from England such as those by Morley, Gibbons, and Byrd. And I would say the same thing about all the Germans, especially Schlitz. You couldn’t be a good choral conductor without having the ability; to interpret say, a Morley Fire, Fire and so on, or an expressive madrigal by Gesualdo that must be built into the conception of the interpretation. You have to do a mass by Mozart and Haydn and from the romantic era the very good choral’ pieces of Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert and so on. And then the whole of the Neoclassic works. You simply couldn’t get around Benjamin Britten either. Some of my favorite composers, thinking choral scores, really are Richard Strauss and Max Reger. I really have been most happy to have that commitment from EMI in Koln where we got a sort of commission to perform these great scores of Strauss and Reger. I guess I recommend these scores because they put you in a situation where you really develop a special type of conducting technique.”

 

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