Andrew Davis

One of the foremost conductors active in the closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, Andrew Davis brought equal authority to symphonic and operatic scores while earning particular admiration for his advocacy of British music, above all the compositions of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and Michael Tippett. He held the title of conductor laureate with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Born on February 2, 1944, in Ashridge, Hertfordshire, England, Davis displayed an early affinity for the keyboard. He pursued formal training first at the Royal College of Music in London and subsequently at King’s College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself both as an organist and as a scholar. Conducting soon became his central focus; he refined his technique at Rome’s Academy of St. Cecilia under Franco Ferrara. His initial major appointment arrived in 1970 with the post of associate conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a position he occupied for two seasons.

International prominence followed swiftly. In 1974 he was named principal guest conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the next year he assumed the music directorship of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Over the course of his thirteen-year tenure in Toronto he guided the ensemble on numerous foreign tours and produced a sequence of notable recordings, among them Handel’s Messiah featuring soloists Florence Quivar, Kathleen Battle, and Samuel Ramey, together with Janáček’s Taras Bulba and The Cunning Little Vixen Suite. Upon his departure in 1988 the orchestra’s artistic stature and worldwide profile had both risen markedly; he was thereafter designated conductor laureate.

In 1988 Davis took the artistic helm of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. The following year he married soprano Gianna Rolandi, with whom he remained until her death in 2021; their son Edward was born in 1989. Also in 1989 he was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with which he undertook extensive international tours that included visits to Hong Kong, the United States, and three journeys to Japan. Recordings with the BBC emphasized contemporary British scores, including Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus and David Sawer’s Byrnan Wood. Throughout the 1990s he collaborated as well with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and additional ensembles, while appearing in opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and the Bavarian State Opera, where his account of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes received widespread acclaim.

Knighted in 1999, Davis relinquished his BBC and Glyndebourne responsibilities in 2000 to become music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His Chicago repertory encompassed Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Massenet’s Thaïs with Renée Fleming, and Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage. During this period he appeared on several recordings, among them The Very Best of Thomas Hampson (2005), The Last Night of the Proms (2008), and 100 Best Tenor Arias (2009).

From 2013 until 2019 he served as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, directing a three-volume survey of Charles Ives’s orchestral music. After stepping down he retained conductor-laureate status with both the BBC Symphony and the Melbourne Symphony. In 2016 he led the Toronto Symphony in a Chandos recording of his own arrangement of Handel’s Messiah. As an exclusive Chandos artist he continued to record prolifically through the 2010s and into the 2020s, issuing, among other projects, a multi-volume edition of Eugene Goossens’s orchestral works with the Melbourne Symphony, the third installment of which appeared in 2020. That same year he conducted the Toronto Symphony in a performance of Massenet’s Thaïs. His tenure at the Lyric Opera ended in 2021, when Enrique Mazzola succeeded him. Also in 2021 he directed the London Symphony Orchestra in a recording of Robert Simpson’s Symphony No. 5. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2022, Davis died on April 20, 2024.