Obituary, Andrew Davis (1944-2024)

The English conductor Andrew Davis has died at the age of 80.

Born in Hertfordshire (in fact, in a Nissen hut in the grounds of Ashridge House) and educated at Watford Boys’ Grammar School, Davis gained early musical experience as a theatre organist, playing for everything from seaside farces to Shakespeare's history plays, and thereafter as organ scholar at King’s College Cambridge. Having decided to focus on conducting, he then studied in Rome with Franco Ferrara, who had also mentored Riccardo Chailly and Riccardo Muti.

Posts at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra followed, as well as the music directorship at Glyndebourne, which Davis held until 2000 and through which he met his future wife, soprano Gianna Rolandi, who died in 2021. He even made an appearance in China, with a 1978 performance of Beethoven with the Peking Central Philharmonic - which at the time was one of the few functioning orchestras in a country still reeling from the anti-Western iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution.

However, it was his appointment as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra that brought him his widest popularity - with Davis reviving the tradition of the BBCSO’s chief conductor conducting the Last Night of the Proms, and featuring humorous speeches in his Last Night appearances. Memorably, in 1992 he performed it in the guise of a parody of the Major-General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance, hailing the Proms as ‘the very model of a modern music festival, with entertainment sonic, promenadable and aestival’. In a 1997 interview with The Independent’s John Walsh he revealed a certain frustration with some of the over-excited contributions from the Prommers - recounting fuming inwardly when a balloon was burst during a particularly poignant solo passage - but he always came up with the goods as an avuncular master of ceremonies.

After eventually stepping down from the BBCSO in 2000, having been knighted the previous year for services to music, Davis once again looked abroad - with an operatic post in Chicago (for which he said the chilly climate of Toronto had well prepared him) that included his first complete Ring des Nibelungen cycle, a spell at Pittsburgh, and finally seven years as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Davis’s repertoire tastes were eclectic, though his core favourites remained Elgar, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Mahler and Rossini - composers he would often combine on the same billing. He was also keen to promote British composers, giving the premiere performance of Michael Tippett’s The Mask of Time and recording numerous contemporary works for NMC, including Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, David Sawer’s Byrnan Wood, Nicholas Sackman’s Hawthorn and more. He was also a champion of Anthony Payne, conducting not just his completion of Elgar’s Symphony No. 3 but also works such as Time’s Arrow. His last recording for NMC, a selection of other works by Payne, is due out in May, as is a recording of Tippett's A Child of Our Time on Chandos.

Davis finally settled in Chicago, living there with his wife and their son, composer Edward Frazier Davis, who survives him. He was diagnosed with leukaemia last year, and died on April 20th. Among those paying tribute on social media were mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, pianist Stephen Hough and fellow conductor Sakari Oramo.

Andrew Davis - a selected discography