Andrew Davis, an ebullient British conductor who brought energy to his countrymen’s compositions and passion to hundreds of opera performances, died on April 20 in Chicago. He was 80.
His manager, Jonathan Brill, said the cause of Mr. Davis’s death, in a hospital, was leukemia.
More than many conductors, Mr. Davis was remembered by those who worked with him as deriving a sense of physical enjoyment from the music — “almost a palpable pleasure,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said in an interview. And that translated into a pleasure for his collaborators. “People loved playing for him,” Mr. Ax said.
Mr. Davis spent 21 years, from 2000 to 2021, as music director and principal conductor of one of America’s great opera companies, Lyric Opera of Chicago, in a vast repertoire ranging from Mozart through Wagner to Berg. He also led orchestras in Canada — the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, from 1975 to 1988 — and Australia — the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, from 2013 to 2019. He also conducted at the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1988 to 2000.
But it was as an interpreter of 20th-century British music, and particularly the works of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst, Britten and others, that Mr. Davis made his mark and earned his way into the affections of his fellow Britons. With its fervid, billowing patriotism and ruminative pastoral interludes, this music sometimes struggles to cross national boundaries.
Mr. Davis, as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000 and at summer London Proms concerts in front of enthusiastic audiences of thousands in the Royal Albert Hall, made the most of the British compositions that were his specialty. This deep homegrown commitment led The New York Times’s Bernard Holland, reviewing a 1987 Avery Fisher Hall appearance by Mr. Davis that included little-known works by Arnold Bax and Michael Tippett, to write that “the music of 20th-century Britain has hugely profited from the fervent ministrations of British musicians and the British musical press.”
Mr. Holland’s lack of enthusiasm about Mr. Davis’s musical choices underscored the difficulty of exporting such quintessentially national music. British critics though, have always been effusive about his championing of their music. “A proven Elgarian whose wonderfully perceptive conducting has authoritative sweep, elasticity and fiery passion to spare,” Andrew Achenbach of Gramophone magazine wrote about his recording of the Elgar violin concerto.
Mr. Davis combined a modest, self-deprecating personal style with a notably energetic podium presence. He “practically vaulted to the podium and seemed utterly delighted to be there,” Steve Smith wrote in The Times in 2010 of a performance of French works.
Complex 20th-century scores like Stravinsky’s 1946 Symphony in Three Movements held no terrors for him. A 2022 recording with the BBC Philharmonic demonstrates his mastery of the work’s turbulent polyphony. When he was a student at Cambridge, he was casually asked if he wanted to conduct Schoenberg’s fearsome Five Pieces for Orchestra; he blithely accepted, and it was only “years later you realize how fiendishly difficult it is,” he remembered, laughing at himself, in an interview with Peter Sagal of NPR two years ago.
“Whenever he comes to conduct, you can just see his love of the music, He’s so excited. It just sort of pours out of his body,” Abbey Edlin, a French horn player in the Melbourne orchestra, said in a video tribute.
The British opera critic Alan Blyth, writing in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, described Mr. Davis as a “conductor whose technical skill was enhanced by an inborn enthusiasm for and dedication to the task in hand that he was able to transfer to the forces before him.” in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Yet his early-career move into conducting — he was a prestigious Organ Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge — was, in his understated telling, almost an afterthought. “I got interested in conducting sort of by accident,” he told Mr. Sagal. He had been invited to conduct a Haydn divertimento, he recalled, and “I thought, well, I rather like this.”
“I liked being able to bring a group together,” he explained. “I suppose the basis of my conducting technique, such as it is, started early.”
His instinctual approach to conducting served him well in opera. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led almost 700 performances of 62 operas, by 22 composers. There were also many performances at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the Bayreuth Festival and elsewhere.
“He was less concerned with detail than a lot of people,” Mr. Ax said. “He was more concerned with the general outline of things. He would think about vigor as opposed to lassitude.” He added: “I think he was about the big picture. That’s why he was terrific in opera.”
Andrew Frank Davis was born on Feb. 2, 1944, in Ashridge, in the county of Hertfordshire, the son of Robert Davis, a typesetter, and Florence Joyce (Badminton) Davis.
He began learning piano at the age of 5 and attended Watford Grammar School for Boys; he sang in the school choir and also played organ for the parish choir. In a reminiscence for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Mr. Davis recalled, in awe-struck tones, seeing the aged Vaughan Williams in a London recording studio when he was a 12-year-old chorister. He studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London, graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1967, and from 1966 to 1970 was pianist, harpsichordist and organist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
Mr. Davis studied conducting in Rome, at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and made his conducting debut in 1970 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His international career took off swiftly after that. He acquired a long list of awards for his recordings, notably with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Davis was knighted in Britain’s 1999 New Year Honors list.
In 1989 he married the American soprano Gianna Rolandi, whom he had conducted in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at the Metropolitan Opera in 1984. She died in 2021.
He is survived by his son, the composer Edward Frazier Davis; a sister, Jill Atkins; and his brothers, Martin and Tim Davis.
“I felt so engaged, engaged with him,” Mr. Ax recalled. “He was with you every step of the way. It was very much a collaborative thing. We were all engaged in the same thing. That’s the mark of a great conductor.”
The post Andrew Davis, 80, Dies; Renowned Conductor Who Championed Britain’s Music appeared first on New York Times.