Any regular readers I may have will by now be
well aware of the great esteem - that almost seems too lame a description - in
which I held Sir Colin Davis. Latterly peerless as a Mozartian, indeed well-nigh
universally recognised as the greatest Mozart conductor after the death of Karl
Böhm, and quite simply the greatest champion Berlioz has ever had and could
ever have, Sir Colin’s greatness as a musician went far beyond those composers.
(He was as highly esteemed in the music of Sibelius, but I am afraid that music
remains a blind spot for me.) I heard from him perhaps
the greatest performance of the Eroica
I have experienced in concert, unquestionably the greatest of any
Mendelssohn symphony and of Haydn’s
Creation; I could go on and on,
and some day probably should.
Living within London’s musical orbit as I do made
Sir Colin an abiding presence in my personal musical life, given the opportunities I was afforded to
hear him both with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Opera. Mozart
requires but one thing, perfection, and more often than not, his operas
received it from this conductor. Single-handedly rescuing Così
fan tutte from an insufferably objectionable production was not the
least of Sir Colin’s achievements; I doubt that even a Böhm performance would
have ravished quite as that did, nor spoken with greater, more lightly-worn
wisdom. Moreover, I cannot imagine a more loving performance than those I heard
from his baton of Ariadne auf Naxos
and Hänsel
und Gretel. As for a 2000 Proms performance of Les Troyens, ‘definitive’ would almost seem inadequate to express
the ‘rightness’ of every aspect of the conducting, utterly unforced, utterly
convincing.
Two of his most recent towering achievements,
both with the LSO, and equally important, with the London Symphony Chorus, were
his Proms performance of Beethoven’s
Missa solemnis – is there any sterner test? – and a City of London Festival
performance, in St Paul’s Cathedral, of Berlioz’s
Requiem. The latter must have been one of the last concerts he gave. (It
may even have been the last; I am not ghoulish enough yet to check.) It was
recently released on LSO Live, and would surely make the most fitting of memorials
for any of us to acquire. Even at the time, both performances seemed especially haunted by intimations of mortality and yet all the more strengthened by humanistic resolution.
Yet it is ultimately the generosity, indeed greatness, of spirit
that will linger still longer than any particular performance. When fully
reunited with the LSO in 1995 as Principal Conductor, he accepted on condition that
he should hold no management responsibilities, believing that power corrupted,
and could only stand in the way of making music. (Not for nothing was he
horrified by the excesses of the Thatcher government.) No martinet could ever
hope to conduct Mozart sympathetically; Sir Colin’s humanity seemingly informed
every note he conducted, and as he grew older, a still greater awareness of the
tragedy lying behind Mozart’s every utterance grew evident. ‘Smiling through
tears’ is a phrase I have employed perhaps too often for Mozart, but it seems
especially appropriate now that we mourn one of his greatest servants. He will surely be in everyone's mind as the Royal Opera's revival of The Magic Flute opens on Tuesday.
(P.S. The above represents my spontaneous appreciation, written as soon as I heard the news of Sir Colin's death. I thought there might be some value in leaving it as it was, rather than revising. However, a fuller, somewhat more detailed version may be read as an obituary here at Seen and Heard International.)
