The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from 1956 until 2011. In fact I realised recently, to my surprise, that he conducted far more of the operas I have been to than any other person.
I first heard him and heard of him in 1956, when I attended a concert performance of Le Nozze di Figaro which he gave in Cambridge’s Guildhall with the Chelsea Opera Group, of which he was for about a decade the main conductor. Perhaps any first acquaintance with Figaro would be an ecstatic experience, but that one certainly was. As a rather late-beginning Mozart lover, it was through Davis more than anyone else that I got to know his operas and came to regard Mozart, with Wagner, as one of the two supreme masters of the form.
The next great encounter was Davis’s conducting of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, also with the Chelsea Opera Group. He worked during that period with young artists such as Alberto Remedios, Sheila Armstrong, Pauline Tinsley and Josephine Veasey. The energy and commitment were electrifying, and even if one saw Davis only from behind, one could, or anyway I did, form a strong impression of his personality, intense, volatile, explosive even. If he heard anyone creeping out of the Guildhall he would turn round and shout a sarcastic remark at their embarrassed disappearing form, then swing back to conduct with renewed ferocity. No wonder he was the greatest Berlioz interpreter, he sometimes seemed like a reincarnation of the man who gives so vivid an account of himself in the Memoirs.
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