by Sir Andrew Davis, the conductor, who has died aged 80, had the unusual honor of being principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera for a decade or so of the 20th century.
Cheerful and upbeat, Davis brought a great sense of humor and country music to both organizations. His job at the BBC required him to preside over the Last Night of the Proms a dozen times, and twice he gave the usual director’s speech in the manner of the great general’s song from The Pirates of Penzance.
In 1997, however, the Last Night claimed a much more subdued tone. Two weeks earlier Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car accident in Paris, and in the days since then Sir Georg Solti and Mother Teresa had died. “I talked about the remarkable legacy that each of them left, and our gratitude,” Davis said. “Many people wrote to say that I helped them come to terms with the tragedy of Diana’s death.”
During the summer months Davis had his work cut out to meet the demands of two such demanding schedules. The BBC SO does the lion’s share of the Proms, where he would conduct six or seven concerts each season, and in East Sussex he was often responsible for two operas, and perhaps a dozen performances of each extra rehearsal.
It was his large-scale pieces in the opera house, especially the works of Richard Strauss, but on the concert stage he was a hard-working, adaptable conductor who could turn his hand to any score, although his interpretations of Elgar. and Tippett especially in mind. While he may have brought a beating stick, like Bernstein, to the high points of Mahler’s music, he had a tender approach in Mendelssohn.
Slender, of average height, typically clad in a knitted cardigan or sweater, Davis exuded a naive, almost childlike enthusiasm on and off the podium. The air was a bit brown on him, learning foreign languages on his own and studying stained glass intently. Instead of asking A directly on the oboe while tuning the orchestra, he would say, more obliquely: “Could you force us?”
Andrew Frank Davis was born in the Nissen cottage in the grounds of Ashridge Hospital, Hertfordshire, on 2 February 1944, the eldest of four children of Robert Davis, a printed composer who played in the local church choir, and his wife Florence (known as Joyce , née Badminton). His mother played the piano as a child, although Davis described his parents as “not particularly musical”. However, they supported their son’s talent, which his religious mother saw as “given by God”.
“I first met a piano when I was five years old and we were inseparable,” he said in 2017, adding that he was a “nerdy kid” and tried his hand on the violin and the oboe. He was 7 when the family moved to the outskirts of Watford, where he sang treble in a local choir. By the age of 13, while studying at Watford Boys’ Grammar School, he was taking organ lessons with Peter Hurford at St Alban’s Cathedral. “It took me out of the games on Wednesday evening,” he said. For six weeks between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Hurford left him in charge of the cathedral choir, and at other times as a teenager he played the organ at the Palace Theatre, Watford.
He gained an organ scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, working under David Willcocks, who encouraged his already deep love of choral music. “I worked with the choir every day, getting up at seven o’clock in the morning to go down to practice with the little boys before breakfast,” he said. He added conducting to his repertoire when a Cambridge friend was putting on a concert and he desperately needed someone to conduct a program that included, shockingly, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.
Davis then spent a year studying under Franco Ferrara at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome: “I learned a lot there about Rossini, but after we studied The Barber of Seville I then suggested that we look at . [Berg’s] Lulu. That didn’t go well, a piece considered at that time in Italy far beyond the pale, strange, ugly, incomprehensible, but it was an expression of the way my taste was going.”
Back in Britain, his rise seemed to have stalled: he played continuo for some small concerts, did some rehearsals for the music publisher Schott’s, and in his first year gave only one concert, with an amateur orchestra.
That changed when he took part in a two-week seminar in 1969 run by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, as one of four apprentice musicians. This led to guest engagements with that orchestra and positions as assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonic Orchestra. His belongings were already packed for the move to Glasgow when he was asked to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra at short notice in Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass. This impressed William Glock, music controller at the BBC, and in 1973 Davis took part in no less. five Proms as both conductor and harpist.
Despite not having come through the traditional opera house as a répétiteur, Davis made his debut at Glyndebourne in 1973 conducting Strauss’s Capriccio, standing in for John Pritchard who offered, Davis recalled, the sage advice “if he thought I thought it was difficult to make a symphony orchestra. behavior, it was as nothing compared to being in the [opera house] hole”. He returned in 1975, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin to reviews such as one from Opera magazine which declared: “The musical side of this Onegin was brilliant.”
In 1975 he was appointed music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, where he expanded his repertoire and trained his technique. Three years later he led the Canadians on a tour of China just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when all Chinese orchestras except the Beijing Philharmonic were disbanded. “We did three concerts in Beijing,” he said. “The first two were in a small hall in front of mainly party officials… For the third concert we had a stadium of 26,000 people, all wearing the same clothes.”
Glyndebourne was appointed in 1988 and the following year John Drummond offered him a job with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He was soon part of the furniture in both, his piercing blue eyes, cherubic demeanor and sweat-drenched chest admired by players and spectators alike.
By the late 1990s Davis and his American wife, the soprano Gianna Rolandi, began tossing around for jobs in their home country. In 2000 he became music director of Lyric Opera Chicago, an appointment he combined in 2013 with becoming principal conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Commuting between the two would be quite stressful, but he continued to appear frequently in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he was conductor (like all his appointments Davis left the BBC on terms as well as he returned regularly). .
In September 2018 he performed his 12th Last Night of the Proms with all the usual fanfare. His enthusiasm was undiminished, although he had suffered at least one heart attack at this time and, perhaps aware of the early death of his co-director Richard Hickox, who traveled regularly between Australia and the UK, he subsequently chose not to renew his Melbourne contract. season 2018. He retired as director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2021.
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 2 February 1944, died 20 April 2024
