Opera: The Turn of the Screw - review; remembering Sir Colin Davis

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.