RIP - Sir Colin Davis

[Prospero]

One of the UK greatest orchestral conductors has died. I have many recordings of music conducted by him. RIP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/apr/14/sir-colin-davis-obituary

[LexusFire]

We have lost an extraordinary teacher, Orchestral Studies owe quite a lot to him, as do we as listeners.
RIP

[Stavros]

Davis did more than anyone in the UK to make Berlioz popular; before his odyssey with Les Troyens at Covent Garden it wasn't even played much in France, owing to its length and the vocal torture inflicted on the singers. For all its passages of brilliance, composing on the guitar seems to have limited Berlioz to some pretty tunes and much repetition and vacuous paragraphs that never seem to go anywhere. For this reason the Symphonie Fantastique is a remarkable work, one can even listen to it many times.

I recall with some bitterness the way in which Davis at the end of a Ring cycle, given as one of the last Midland Bank proms at Covent Garden in 1979, made sarcastic remarks about the Labour government about to fall to Mrs T's philistine government. And in one of those bizarre evenings that can happen, in the early eighties he conducted a performance of Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden even slower than the one I heard in Vienna under Thielemann about 7 years ago, where the first act alone lasted one hour and 25 minutes! - anyway, Edward Heath was in a box with his mother, and from where I was sitting I kept noticing in the seats below a woman's cleavage only to realise in the interval that it was John Osborne's ex-wife, the actress Jill Bennett; and someone from the place I worked in at the time was there with his wife. It was torture, unrelieved by the tonal atrocities committed by Jon Vickers.

And yet, Davis conducted the best performance of Don Giovanni I have heard in an opera house (1975) and also of Fidelio (in a ludicrous production complete with flying skeletons).

He dismissed Mahler as 'overwrought', and said Russian music was fit only for the circus. At his last performance at Covent Garden (which might have been that Fidelio) he was given the complete works of Schiller, in German. His second, Persian wife turned him on to Gurdjieff, something that would probably result in an acrimonious divorce in other marriages, and he was apparently consoled at a difficult time of his life by reading Kazantzakis and Hermann Broch's opaque novel The Death of Virgil (a novel structured in the form of string quartet by Beethoven, but not sure which one).

And, as LexusFire has stated he worked well with musicians after an early period in which he was rude and temperamental; and I believe was particularly influential with young musicians and youth orchestras here and in Europe. Finally I should also say that during his tenure at Covent Garden he did preside over more new contemporary operas than his successor, Bernard Haitink, including Richard Rodney Bennet's Victory (from the Conrad novel); Hans-Werner Henze's We Come to the River; Penderecki's The Devils of Loudon; and the Tippett operas he liked so much, feeble though they are.