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.
Davis was, so I gathered, for a long time a deeply dissatisfied man, questing for something between a philosophy and a religion, which could be emotionally responded to in terms of music. He studied writers such as Hermann Hesse in search of spiritual nourishment, though I have no idea if he finally embraced any particular world view. Though one wouldn’t necessarily have concluded from his conducting that he was undergoing personal crises, it certainly changed in character over the years. Sometimes this erstwhile most energetic of conductors seemed becalmed, with performances, more in the orchestral than the operatic repertoire, apparently aiming at a stasis that is impossible for music.
At Covent Garden, the second of his operatic phases, he took on a large repertoire, with some surprising results. His accounts of Tippett’s progressively stranger works were definitive. His Ring performances were unnaturally slow, and really he never sounded at home in Wagner, but with his favourite tenor, Jon Vickers, he nonetheless achieved some unforgettable results. He had a surprising penchant for such composers as Massenet and Saint-Saëns, while, strangely, the peculiar kind of energy that Verdi demands and exudes often eluded him. His last operatic phase was Mozart and Humperdinck at the Royal Opera, various composers at the Barbican with the LSO and, perhaps above all, wonderful performances at the Royal Academy of Music, where the verve and relaxation that he achieved ensured evenings of extraordinary pleasure. With all the elements in these masterpieces in ideal balance, it appeared that he had, at least professionally, achieved the state which he spent his life seeking.
Davis was due to conduct Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at the Barbican, but in the event the two performances were taken over by Richard Farnes, whose conducting had an urgency and clarity that no one could surpass. A knee injury prevented my negotiating the Barbican’s steps and stairs, so I listened on the radio, and was struck by how different an experience I had of the work from any of the innumerable times I have seen it in the theatre. The orchestral music — often hard to believe that only 17 instruments are involved — seemed more spooky and atmospheric than ever, and amazing in its sonic inventiveness.
But the voices seemed to belong to a different world. Only in Miss Jessel’s long scene, wonderfully sung by Katherine Broderick, did the music seem to belong to her. Otherwise the characters have to fend for themselves, though of course Miles’s music, sung with perfect purity and aplomb by Michael Clayton-Jolly, could only be that of a young boy, about whose innocence or otherwise we are carefully kept in almost complete ignorance. ‘You see, I am bad, I am bad, aren’t I?’ Miles’s line, with which Act I ends, could just as easily be a mere tease as something with a more sinister undertone. Henry James tells in the Preface to the story that he was determined to make his phlegmatic male amanuensis shudder as he invented ever more lurid suggestions; and it seems to me that that is what Britten and Piper are doing in the opera. Just as the tale is no more than a brilliant thriller, as Leavis conclusively argued, so one can say that about the opera too.
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