‘This is the very model of a modern music festival’. As he rounded off his speech with these words, playing on the Major-General’s Song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, Sir Andrew Davis, who has died aged 80, put his own indelible stamp on Last Night of the Proms history.
This, in September 1992, was the fourth occasion on which Davis had conducted the famous occasion – he would lead the way in 12 in total, a number beaten only by Sir Malcolm Sargent and Sir Henry Wood himself.
A gregarious, vivacious character with a perpetual glint in his eye, Davis was the ideal conductor for the Last Night of the Proms, but there was, of course, much more to him than that, and his long career saw him enjoy acclaim – plus friends galore – in concert halls, opera houses and recording studios on both sides of the Atlantic.
Born and brought up in Hertfordshire, he began his musical life by playing the organ at his local parish church and then at the Palace Theatre in Watford as a teenager, before studying at the Royal Academy of Music and then winning an organ scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. Further studies at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome paved the way to appointments as assistant conductor at the BBC Scottish Symphony and Philharmonia orchestras in the early 1970s.
In 1975, the 31-year-old Davis was appointed to his first major post, when he became music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Thirteen successful years in Canada followed before, in 1988, Glyndebourne Opera came calling with the offer of the position of music director.
The following year, he also became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, setting in motion that close relationship with the BBC Proms, among much else. He would remain in both posts until 2000, when he accepted the post of principal conductor and music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, a position he would hold with aplomb for 21 years, making Chicago his home.
Sir Andrew made a wealth of recordings, particularly for the Chandos and Warner Classics labels, including for the former a disc of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and Sea Pictures that won the BBC Music Magazine Choral Award in 2015. Alongside further Elgar, Davis’s complete Vaughan Williams symphony cycle marked him out as a superlative conductor of English music – his recordings of the likes of Holst, Bax and Finzi were equally well regarded – though he did also shine with the likes of Berg, Dvořák and Berlioz. Away from music, he exercised his love of classics by writing his own translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid during lockdown.
For all his success, however, he remained famously humble and down to earth, beloved as much by the soloists and orchestral musicians he conducted as he was by audiences – the very model of a modern conductor, in fact.
