Davis’s Golden Years

The British conductor Sir Colin Davis will be coming to New York this month to lead the London Symphony in the first of three scheduled concerts beginning October 17 as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers season. At 80, Sir Colin has lost none of the charisma and ability that have made him one of the most consistently invigorating and inspiring conductors of the past half-century.Part of Sir Colin’s persuasiveness is due to his fizzy sense of rhythm, which enlivens everything from a chorus in Handel’s “Messiah” (his 1966 recording of which is justly considered a classic) to Mozart and Haydn. Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” even when led by a masterful maestro such as Rafael Kubelik, who performed the gigantic work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1973, cannot match Sir Colin’s uncanny sense of rhythm in his own recordings of the work, which possess the vivacity and naturalness of a great jazz player.This freshness may be due in part to the fact that unlike most conductors, who begin musical studies as pianists, Sir Colin, born in Weybridge, Surrey, UK, in 1927, was a clarinetist before taking up the baton. Intimate knowledge of this collaborative wind instrument helped him feel like part of a section even while conducting, in addition to adding extra delight to his recordings of works with supreme clarinet virtuosos such as the Englishman Gervase de Peyer.This intense and life-giving ebullience has been matched for all of his adult life with a corresponding somberness. Sir Colin is fond of quoting the Austrian writer Hermann Broch (1886–1951) whose “Death of Virgil” describes the “extraordinary oppression which falls on every human being when, childhood over, he begins to divine that he is fated to go in isolation and unaided toward his own death.” His lifelong awareness of impending doom and awareness of his own mortality has served as a real form of wisdom and a source of Sir Colin’s musical achievement.I interviewed Sir Colin 15 years ago at his hotel on the Place des Vosges in Paris, when he began a sentence, “Now that I am near death…” I looked at the hale and hearty 60-something-year-old with disbelief, and he qualified the statement, “Well, nearer…” His nervous sensitivity and dreaminess were ever-present during that meeting, and his crinkly hair seemed to reflect constant brain waves of free association. When I confessed to Davis that years before, during a particularly hopeless moment in my own adolescence, I had felt unexpected joy at hearing a TV broadcast of him conducting Elgar’s “Cockaigne” overture, the conductor’s eyes shone with empathy and commiseration.Empathy is a byword of Sir Colin’s music-making. He has always been the antithesis of a “dictator of the baton” and has even gone on record against maestros such as the late Herbert von Karajan whose approach to music and musicians is one of domination. Indeed, one of his great podium virtues is just letting the virtuoso instrumentalists play rather than giving the impression of trying to control their every move in some kind of power ploy, a fatal flaw in conductors with resonant careers such as Lorin Maazel, to name just one. Sir Colin’s own contrasting sense of modesty and mortality may have helped to nurture what is by any standard an inspiring late flowering of recordings on the LSO Live label of masterpieces like Verdi’s autumnal “Falstaff,” Berlioz’s “L’enfance du Christ,” “Roméo et Juliette,” and “Les Troyens,” and dozens more. The extraordinary insight in these recordings is matched in recent years only by some late CDs conducted by Claudio Abbado, after his own bout with mortal illness a few years back. Sir Colin has made at least one misstep among this frenetic performing and recording activity: an atypically limp and exhausted-sounding EMI CD of Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto and Schumann’s Piano Concerto, both with the gifted but sometimes-wayward soloist Evgeny Kissin, was a recent disappointment.This rare clunker reminds us that despite his metaphysical awareness, Sir Colin’s own life has not been immune to the professional ups and downs of any musical career, and after he was finally knighted in 1980 at age 53, he was quoted with some bemusement when younger, less achieving musicians like Simon Rattle were given the same honor before the age of 40. There have been other frustrations, such as when an uncanny 1970s series of performances of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” could not be recorded for lack of funds — or interest from those who could have provided the funds. But, overall, Sir Colin’s career exudes a sense of music as wisdom literature as is only expressed by the greatest conductors. Manhattan music fans should run, not walk, to hear Sir Colin in Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven at Lincoln Center.

Davis’s Golden Years

Davis’s Golden Years

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