Conductor Sir Andrew Davis, who has died aged 80, had the extraordinary honor of simultaneously being chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera in the last decade of the 20th century.
The cheerful and giggly Davis brought a great sense of humor and an innate musicality to both organizations. His BBC posting required him to conduct the Last Night of the Proms a dozen times, and twice he delivered the conductor’s traditional speech in the style of the major-general’s patter song from The Pirates of Penzance.
But 1997’s Last Night required an altogether more somber tone. Two weeks earlier, Diana, Princess of Wales had died in a car crash in Paris, and in the days since, both Sir Georg Solti and Mother Teresa had died. “I talked about the extraordinary legacy each of them left and our gratitude,” Davis recalled. “Many people have written to me to help them come to terms with the tragedy of Diana’s death.”
During the summer, Davis cut his work short to meet the demands of two such demanding schedules. The BBC SO undertook the lion’s share of the Proms, where it would conduct six or seven concerts each season, while in East Sussex it often had responsibility for two operas with a dozen performances each plus rehearsals.
His forte at the opera house was large-scale pieces, especially works by Richard Strauss; but he was a hard-working and adaptable conductor who could turn his hand to almost any note, despite Elgar’s comments on the concert platform. and Tippett was particularly memorable. Although he brought a harsh, Bernstein-like baton to the heights of Mahler’s music, Mendelssohn also had a compassionate approach.
Slim, of medium height, typically wearing a knit cardigan or sweater, Davis exuded an endearing, almost childlike, naive enthusiasm both on and off the catwalk. He had a somewhat dull air, learning foreign languages for its own sake and studying stained glass windows carefully. When tuning the orchestra, instead of directly asking the oboe for the note A, he would say more indirectly: “Can you please us?”
Andrew Frank Davis was born on 2 February 1944 in a Nissen cottage on the grounds of Ashridge Hospital in Hertfordshire, the eldest of four children of Robert Davis, a printing typesetter who sang in the local church choir, and his wife Florence (who was well known). Joyce, née Badminton). His mother played the piano in his childhood, but Davis described his parents as “not particularly musical.” Still, they were supportive of their son’s talent, which his devout mother considered “God-given.”
“I was first introduced to the piano when I was five and we were inseparable,” he recalled in 2017, adding that he was a “nerdy kid” and also tried his hand at the violin and oboe. She was 7 when the family moved to the edge of Watford, where she sang high in a local choir. By the age of 13, he was studying at Watford Boys’ Grammar School and taking organ lessons from Peter Hurford at St Alban’s Cathedral. “He took me away from the games on Wednesday afternoon,” he joked. Hurford put him in charge of the cathedral choir during the six weeks between leaving school and going to Cambridge, while at other times during his teenage years he played the organ at the Palace Theater in Watford.
He won an organ scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, studying under David Willcocks, who encouraged his deep love of choral music. “I practiced with the choir every day, getting up at seven in the morning and going downstairs to rehearse with the little kids before breakfast,” he recalled. He added conducting to his repertoire when a friend in Cambridge was giving a concert and he urgently needed someone to conduct a program that included, rather frighteningly, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.
Davis then spent a year studying conducting under Franco Ferrara at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome: “I learned a lot about Rossini then, but after reading The Barber of Seville I suggested we could look at: [Berg’s] Lulu. It wasn’t very well received, it was a piece that was considered pale, strange, ugly and well beyond incomprehensible in Italy at the time, but it was indicative of where my taste was going.”
When he returned to Britain his rise seemed to stall: he played constantly in a few small gigs, did some rehearsals for the music publisher Schott’s, and conducted only one concert with an amateur orchestra in his first year.
Everything changed when, as one of four apprentice conductors, he attended a two-week seminar conducted by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969. This led to guests engaging with this orchestra and serving as assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonic Orchestra. His belongings were already packed to move to Glasgow when he was asked to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra at short notice in Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass. This impressed the BBC’s music controller, William Glock, and in 1973 Davis appeared in a minimal number of concerts. five Proms as both conductor and harpsichordist.
Although he was unable to complete the traditional opera house route as répétiteur, Davis made his stage debut at Glyndebourne in 1973, conducting Strauss’s Capriccio, replacing John Pritchard and offering the following sage advice, as Davis recalls: “If a symphony orchestra is difficult behavior was nothing compared to being there [opera house] hole”. He returned in 1975 and directed Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with reviews such as in Opera magazine saying: “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 refined his technique. Three years later, he took 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 played three concerts in Beijing,” he recalled. “The first two were in a small hall, mostly in front of party officials… The third concert we played in a stadium with a capacity of 26,000 people, all in the same clothes.”
His Glyndebourne appointment came in 1988, and the following year John Drummond gave him the BBC Symphony Orchestra post. It soon became part of the furniture in both; His piercing blue eyes, angelic grin, and sweat-dripping forehead were adored by actors and audiences alike.
In the late 1990s, Davis and his American wife, soprano Gianna Rolandi, began looking for a position in his hometown. In 2000, he became music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and combined this appointment with his position as principal conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2013. Juggling the two would have been challenging enough, but he continued to appear frequently in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, for which he was a conductor laureate (like all his appointments, Davis left the BBC on such good terms that he returned regularly). .
In September 2018, he held the 12th Last Night of the Proms with his usual chauvinism. Although he had already suffered at least one heart attack and was probably aware of the early death of his fellow chef Richard Hickox, who traveled regularly between Australia and the UK, his enthusiasm was undiminished. 2018 season. He resigned 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. They were survived by their son, Edward, who became a composer.
Sir Andrew Davis was born on 2 February 1944, died on 20 April 2024.