Musical America Blogs

By David Cairns (published December 1996)

I first met Colin Davis in the winter of 1949-50. I was living in London, in Chelsea, doing my military service but nurturing the half-formed ambition of becoming a singer. My flat-mate, Stephen Gray, collected an orchestra of amateurs and young professionals to give a concert performance of Don Giovanni in the Holywell Music Room at Oxford. He knew just the man to conduct it, he said: a clarinet student at the Royal College of Music, a musician of great flair and already an exceptional Mozartian.

It was an act of faith on Stephen’s part. (Colin had conducted practically nothing in public. Not being a pianist, he was debarred from taking the conductor’s course at the college.) But that was the kind of reaction Colin Davis inspired. He was only 22, but he seemed to have complete authority. The moment one met him one believed in him utterly. He was different.

In addition to his compelling musicianship, there was about him a quickness and subtlety of mind and at the same time an articulateness, a directness not often found in musicians and certainly quite untypical of the Oxford of those days. I remember the audible gasp from the packed audience at that first Don Giovanni when, after some uncharacteristically ragged chords at the start of the duet “Eh via buffone,” he stopped the orchestra and said, “Come on, strings, you can do better than that.” The combined power of his conducting and personality cast a spell on us all. There was nothing we wouldn’t have done for him.

His career has by no means been all clear sailing. The opportunities for young would-be conductors (especially if they didn’t play the piano) were far fewer in the 1950s. It wasn’t until seven years after the Holywell Don Giovanni that he got his first professional post, assistant conductor at the BBC Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow. The years at Sadler’s Wells in the early 1960s made a considerable stir—his Oedipus Rex, Entführung, Idomeneo, and Mahagonny were particularly memorable—but it was a setback when in 1965 the job of Pierre Monteux’s successor at the London Symphony went to István Kertész instead. Davis got the BBC, and later Covent Garden, but it was the LSO that he had set his heart on.

There’s an aptness in his being honored by Musical America. The States welcomed him much more unreservedly than, until recently, his own country did. His late-’60s and early-’70s appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, beginning with Peter Grimes, and his long stint as principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony (1972-84), like his more recent work in Germany with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Dresden Staatskapelle, did not attract the critical sniping that went on during his time as music director at Covent Garden (1971-86). In Britain he had to contend with the national urge to disparage one’s own successes, and with the general difficulty, especially for an outstanding talent, of being accepted ungrudgingly by contemporaries you have grown up with. (Bernard Haitink, his successor at Covent Garden, faced the same problem in his native Holland.) Was he perhaps failing to fulfill his early promise? And could a conductor who was good at Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky also be good at Verdi or Wagner?

The superb performances Davis directed at Covent Garden of operas as diverse as Falstaff, Pelléas, The Rake’s Progress, The Midsummer Marriage, Otello, Figaro, and Tristan, and the rhythmic vitality and beauty of orchestral detail he brought to The Ring, were a decisive answer to such questions.

All the same, I don’t think he was really happy there. He lacked the attributes required of a dominating director: ruthlessness, self-importance, appetite for political maneuvering. He was too private a person to enjoy the smart socializing and too humane to play the tyrant. He was also not a natural diplomat. No doubt he has mellowed since that time. But what struck me even then, 25 years ago, when I was involved in some of his biggest recording projects, was the patience, the complete absence of prima donna-ishness, and the sanity with which he presided over the massed forces of musicians and technicians, while radiating energy and inspiring everyone with his vision of the work in hand—how calm and good humored he remained, and how ready he was to defuse tension with a quick sally. I can see him now, at the first session of the Berlioz Requiem in the august precincts of Westminster Cathedral, while the scaffolding men were still noisily fixing the chorus risers, extending a mock-denunciatory hand toward a recalcitrant member of the children’s choir and calling, “Excommunicate that boy!”

Has he changed as a musician? Klemperer got slower and more monumental, and

Toscanini often faster and more impatient. As he nears 70, Davis sounds what he is, a very experienced conductor and also, on the face of it, a conservative one. He belongs to the tradition of the conductor as free interpreter and of the musical work as a historically evolving organism. The period-instrument movement is not for him (though he may be more influenced by it than he would admit, to

judge by the exceptional prominence of woodwinds in relation to the strings in his recently recorded Beethoven cycle with the Dresden Staatskapelle). He will not be stampeded by what the metronome mark says you should do. He will choose a tempo at which he can try to express all that the music tells him, all the multitudinous life he finds in it; he will take his time.

There is a darkness now, a tragic weight about some of his interpretations that reflects the deeply considered outlook of someone with no illusions about the human race. But the old humor, the mixture of seriousness and levity so essential for Mozart and Haydn, among others, are still there. I doubt that he has changed in any fundamental way. If the British have decided to value him wholeheartedly, it is they who have changed rather than he. They have even made him an old master; and his concerts as principal conductor of the London Symphony (the job he didn’t get 30 years ago) are red-letter days.

He seems a little young to be thus canonized. From reports of his recent concerts with the New York Philharmonic, both the orchestra and its audiences have already found a master fired by the same vision and vitality that so excited those who first came under his spell nearly half a century ago.

David Cairns was co-founder of the Chelsea Opera Group and sang in its early performances. He is founder and conductor of the Thorington Players, an amateur orchestra that gives regular concerts in London. He has taught at the University of California at Davis. But his main activity has been as a writer on music. His publications include Berlioz: the Making of an Artist, Responses: Musical Essays and Reviews, and (as co-author) the English National Opera Guides on The Magic Flute and Falstaff. He is senior music critic on the London Sunday Times.