Sir Andrew Davis, jovial conductor who brought humour to the Last Night of the Proms – obituary
Sir Andrew Davis, the conductor, who has died aged 80, held the unusual honour of being concurrently chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and musical director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera during the last decade or so of the 20th century.
Cheery and chuckling, Davis brought to both organisations a great sense of humour and an innate musicality. His BBC post required him to lead the Last Night of the Proms on a dozen occasions, and twice he delivered the conductor’s customary 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 sombre tone. Two weeks earlier Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash in Paris, and in the days since then both Sir Georg Solti and Mother Teresa had died. “I spoke of the remarkable legacy each had left, and of our gratitude,” Davis recalled. “Many people wrote to say that I had 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 undertakes the lion’s share of the Proms, of which he would conduct six or seven concerts each season, while in East Sussex he often had responsibility for two operas, with maybe a dozen performances of each plus rehearsals.
His forte in the opera house were the large-scale pieces, not least the works of Richard Strauss, but on the concert platform he was a hard-working and adaptable conductor who could turn his hand to almost any score, although his interpretations of Elgar and Tippett were particularly memorable. While he may have brought a thrashing, Bernstein-like baton to the climaxes of Mahler’s music, he had a tender approach in Mendelssohn.
Slender, of medium height, typically clad in a knitted cardigan or sweater, Davis exuded an endearing, almost childlike naïve enthusiasm, both on and off the podium. He had a slightly donnish air, learning foreign languages for their own sake and studying stained glass intently. Rather than asking the oboe directly for an A when tuning the orchestra, he would say, more obliquely: “Could you oblige us?”
Andrew Frank Davis was born in a Nissen hut in the grounds of Ashridge Hospital, Hertfordshire, on February 2 1944, the eldest of four children of Robert Davis, a print type compositor who sang in the local church choir, and his wife Florence (known as Joyce, née Badminton). His mother had played the piano as a child, although Davis described his parents as “not especially musical”. Nevertheless, they were supportive of their son’s talent, which his religious mother viewed as “God-given”.
“I first met a piano when I was five years old and we couldn’t be separated,” he recalled in 2017, adding that he had been “a nerdy kid” and had also tried his hand at the violin and oboe. He was seven when the family moved to the edge 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 got me out of games on a Wednesday afternoon,” he quipped. For six weeks between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Hurford left him in charge of the cathedral choir, 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, working under David Willcocks, who encouraged his already profound love of choral music. “I worked with the choir every day, getting up at seven o’clock in the morning to go down to rehearse the little boys before breakfast,” he recalled. He added conducting to his repertoire when a friend at Cambridge was putting on a concert and urgently needed someone to conduct a programme that, rather terrifyingly, included 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 learnt a lot then about Rossini, but after we studied The Barber of Seville I then suggested we might look at [Berg’s] Lulu. That didn’t go down well, a piece then considered in Italy well beyond the pale, strange, ugly, incomprehensible, but it was indicative of the way my taste was going.”
Back in Britain, his ascent seemed to have stalled: he played continuo for a few minor concerts, did some proof reading for the music publisher Schott’s, and in his first year conducted only one concert, with an amateur orchestra.
That all changed when, as one of four apprentice maestros, he took part in a two-week seminar in 1969 run by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This led to guest engagements with that orchestra and posts as assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonia 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, controller of music at the BBC, and in 1973 Davis took part in no fewer than five Proms as either conductor or harpsichordist..
Despite not having come through the traditional opera house route as répétiteur, Davis made his debut at Glyndebourne in 1973 conducting Strauss’s Capriccio, stepping in for John Pritchard who, Davis recalled, offered the sage advice “that if I thought a symphony orchestra was difficult to conduct, it was as nothing compared to being in the [opera house] pit”. He returned in 1975, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin to reviews such as one from Opera magazine that declared: “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 other than the Beijing Philharmonic had been disbanded. “We did three concerts in Beijing,” he recalled. “The first two were in a small hall in front of mainly party officials… For the third concert we played a stadium of 26,000 people, all wearing the same clothes.”
His Glyndebourne appointment came in 1988 and the following year John Drummond gave him the BBC Symphony Orchestra post. Soon he was part of the furniture in both, his piercing blue eyes, cherubic grin and sweat-dripping forehead adored by players and audiences alike.
By the end of the 1990s Davis and his American wife, the soprano Gianna Rolandi, began casting around for a post in her homeland. In 2000 he became music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, an appointment he combined in 2013 with being chief conductor of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Commuting between these two would have been strain enough, but he continued to make frequent appearances 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 returned regularly).
In September 2018 he conducted his 12th Last Night of the Proms with all the usual jingoism. His enthusiasm was undiminished, though by now he had suffered at least one heart attack and, possibly aware of the early death of his fellow conductor Richard Hickox, who had commuted regularly between Australia and the UK, he chose not to renew his Melbourne contract after the 2018 season. He stepped down as director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2021.
Last year he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
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