The Knitting Maestro

Classical Music

By GEOFFREY NORRIS, The Daily Telegraph
May 16, 2008

LONDON — "I do a bit in the garden. I do a lot of knitting. I read as many books as I can." This litany of pastimes might sound like a carefree retirement option, but they are only the relaxing interludes in the work schedule of the conductor Sir Colin Davis, who marked his 80th birthday last year but has no intention of hanging up his baton just yet. Reading and knitting help him think.

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Andrew Crowley

Sir Colin Davis for Arts and Books. Sir Colin Davis senior conductor with the LSO. Picture taken at his home in North London. dtfedtac. Copyright: Andrew Crowley. Mob:07973 254 493.

So does pipe-smoking. He was named Pipe Smoker of the Year by the British Pipesmokers' Council in 1996. "I'm allowed to smoke my pipe in my own garden," he reflects ruefully, referring to the tobacco ban. "It's not a public space."

Mr. Davis the conductor is as far removed from pipe-and-slippers reflection on the past as you could imagine. That past has been illustrious, and last week was acknowledged with an award for Male Artist of the Year by the Classical Brit Awards. But he continues to be open to new challenges. The very evening before our meeting, he had conducted the world premiere of James MacMillan's "St. John Passion," specially commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra to celebrate his birthday.

"A piece like that took many, many weeks of hard work," he said. "You can study something with great intensity for two or three days, and then you've got to put it away. Then you go through it again and again, and gradually build up a picture — a forecast, if you like — of what you're going to hear. I thought it was a brave demonstration that we're not all past it."

Mr. Davis punctuated our conversation with such self-effacing remarks, but they concealed an energy that people half his age would relish. After more than a decade as the LSO's principal conductor, he was named president last year when Valery Gergiev took over as chief.

"Usually you make someone president when you want to get rid of them," he said, "but it isn't like that."

While he will be returning to repertoire he has done before — Sibelius, Mozart, Berlioz, Brahms, and so on — he is also embarking on Nielsen symphonies for the first time and, even more surprisingly, giving his first-ever performance of that 20th-century choral classic, Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast," during the LSO's Heirs and Rebels series of English music starting in the autumn.

"I'm not being put out to pasture, either alone or with my favorite works," said Mr. Davis. "I'm just very happy if they ask me to do things. I don't think I'll get in Mr. Gergiev's way, at least not wittingly; and, after all, there's a limit to the amount of time a principal conductor can spend with an orchestra, especially someone like him, with so many commitments elsewhere."

Mr. Gergiev's legendarily hectic life has caused eyebrows to be raised in some quarters. Is it a good thing for a principal conductor to have so many other responsibilities? "I don't know," Mr. Davis said diplomatically. "I haven't."

Nevertheless, Mr. Davis maintains contacts with orchestras in New York, Boston, and Munich that he has worked with for decades. "It's very pleasant to go to places and work with people I know," he said, and maybe the secret of the rapport he has established with the LSO and others lies in this calm enjoyment and in his uninflated view of the conductor's role.

I remind him of the violinist Nigel Kennedy's recent comments about the arrogance and futility of conductors. "I don't see why we should take seriously a fellow who has made such an idiot of himself," Mr. Davis responds in his quiet, unruffled way. "He can play the fiddle very, very well, but he went off on that spree, making himself a celebrity. Silly boy. I'd like to see him play the Elgar concerto without a conductor."

History, however, does record some notable tyrants on the podium, in the shape, say, of Karajan or Toscanini. "I don't wish to criticize anybody," said Mr. Davis, "but you're talking about a degree of egomania. It's not very attractive. I've heard Toscanini's performance of Verdi's Requiem [which Mr. Davis himself is conducting next January], and it's just inhuman. It doesn't have any of the things I want out of music: It's tense and without freedom."

"The goal of making music is freedom to cooperate. It's a sensitive, delicate business. It depends on mutual respect. If your ideas come from and belong to the music, the musicians will be interested in the same things, so there will be no conflict. The whole point of having a conductor is to stop people talking, otherwise it's chaos.

"If you have 90 people deciding how to play Mahler's Fifth Symphony, you won't get anywhere. And if the conductor himself stops talking, it's even better."