Sir Andrew Davis, the conductor who has died aged 80, had the unusual honor of being simultaneously principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera during the last decade of the 20th century.
Cheerful and chuckling, Davis brought a great sense of humor and an innate musicality to both organizations. His BBC post required him to conduct the Last Night of the Proms twelve times, and twice he delivered the usual conductor's speech in the manner of the Major General's patter song from The Pirates of Penzance.
In 1997, however, the Last Night called for an altogether more somber tone. Two weeks earlier, Diana, Princess of Wales, had died in a car accident in Paris, and in the days that followed, both Sir Georg Solti and Mother Teresa had died. "I spoke about the remarkable legacy that each of us had left, and about our gratitude," Davis recalled. "Many people wrote that I had helped them cope with the tragedy of Diana's death."
During the summer months, Davis had his work cut out to keep up with the demands of two such demanding schedules. The BBC SO does the lion's share of the Proms, of which he conducts six or seven concerts each season, while in East Sussex he often had responsibility for two operas, with perhaps a dozen performances of each plus rehearsals.
His forte at the opera house was the large-scale pieces, not least the works of Richard Strauss, but on the concert stage he was a hard-working and adaptable conductor who could play almost any score, although his interpretations of Elgar and Tippett were particularly memorable . While he may have brought a slamming, Bernstein-esque baton to the climaxes of Mahler's music, with Mendelssohn he had a tender approach.
Slender, of medium height, typically dressed in a knit cardigan or sweater, Davis exuded an endearing, almost childlike naive enthusiasm both on and off stage. He had a somewhat Donnist appearance, learned foreign languages for himself and attentively studied stained glass windows. Instead of asking the oboe directly for an A when tuning the orchestra, he said, more indirectly, "Can you help us?"
Andrew Frank Davis was born on 2 February 1944 in a Nissen hut in the grounds of Ashridge Hospital, Hertfordshire, the eldest of four children of Robert Davis, a letter composer who sang in the local church choir, and his wife Florence (known as Joyce , born badminton). His mother played piano as a child, although Davis described his parents as "not particularly musical". Nevertheless, they supported their son's talent, which his religious mother considered "God-given."
"I first met a piano when I was five years old and we couldn't part," he recalled in 2017, adding that he had been "a nerdy kid" and had also tried violin and oboe. He was seven when the family moved to the outskirts of Watford, where he sang high notes in a local choir. At the age of 13, while studying at Watford Boys Grammar School, he took organ lessons with Peter Hurford at St. Alban's Cathedral. "It meant I couldn't play any more games on Wednesday afternoons," he joked. Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Hurford left him in charge of the cathedral choir for six weeks, while on other occasions in his teens he played the organ at the Palace Theatre, Watford.
He won an organ scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he worked under David Willcocks, who encouraged his already profound love of choral music. 'I worked with the choir every day. I would get up at seven in the morning to go down for breakfast to rehearse the little boys," he recalls. He added conducting to his repertoire when a friend was giving a concert in Cambridge and urgently needed someone to conduct a program that, rather alarmingly, included Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra.
Davis then studied conducting for a year with Franco Ferrara at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome: "I learned a lot about Rossini at the time, but after we studied The Barber of Seville I suggested we might look at [Berg's] Lulu. That didn't go down well, a piece that was considered in Italy at the time to be far beyond the pale, strange, ugly and incomprehensible, but it was indicative of the way my tastes were going.
Back in Britain his rise seemed to have stalled: he played continuo for a few small concerts, did some proofreading for music publisher Schott's and conducted only one concert in his first year, with an amateur orchestra.
That all changed when he took part as one of four student maestros in a two-week seminar of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969. This led to guest involvement with that orchestra and posts as assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonia Orchestra. His things were already packed for the move to Glasgow when he was asked at short notice to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Janácek's Glagolitic Mass. This impressed William Glock, music controller at the BBC, and in 1973 Davis took part in no fewer than five Proms as conductor and harpsichordist.
Despite not having followed the traditional opera house route as a répétiteur, Davis made his Glyndebourne debut in 1973 conducting Strauss's Capriccio. He replaced John Pritchard who, Davis recalled, gave the sage advice "that if I thought a symphony orchestra was difficult to form, behavior, it was nothing compared to being in the [opera house] pit". He returned in 1975 and conducted Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin to reviews such as one from Opera magazine which stated: "The musical side of this Onegin was sensational."
In 1975 he was appointed music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, where he expanded his repertoire and honed his technique. Three years later he led the Canadians on a tour of China, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, during which every Chinese orchestra except the Beijing Philharmonic had been disbanded. "We gave three concerts in Beijing," he recalls. "The first two were in a small hall for mainly party officials... For the third concert we played in a stadium with 26,000 people, all dressed in the same clothes."
His appointment at Glyndebourne came in 1988 and the following year John Drummond gave him the post at the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He soon became part of the furniture in both, his piercing blue eyes, angelic grin and sweat-beaded brow adored by players and audiences alike.
Towards the end of the 1990s, Davis and his American wife, the soprano Gianna Rolandi, began looking for a post in her home country. In 2000, he became music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, an appointment he combined in 2013 with that of chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Commuting between the two would have been difficult enough, but he continued to perform regularly in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he was conductor laureate (like all his appointments, Davis had left the BBC on such good terms that he regularly returned). .
In September 2018 he conducted his 12th Last Night of the Proms with all the usual jingoism. His enthusiasm was as great as ever, although he had now suffered at least one heart attack and, possibly aware of the early death of his fellow conductor Richard Hickox, who had regularly shuttled between Australia and Britain, he decided not to renew his contract in Melbourne. extend. the 2018 season. In 2021, he stepped down as director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Andrew Davis was appointed CBE in 1992 and knighted in 1999. His third wife, Gianna Rolandi, whom he married in 1989, predeceased him in 2021. He is survived by their son Edward, who is a composer.
Sir Andrew Davis, born February 2, 1944, died April 20, 2024
