Review - Colin Davis in Amsterdam and London
David Gutman
Friday, November 29, 2024
David Gutman revisits the British conductor’s recordings with two major orchestras
It’s tempting to describe Colin Davis as an impatient firebrand turned shaman, though he was also consistent, grounded and practical, an International Chair of Orchestral Studies at the Royal Academy of Music for more than 25 years. Earlier, at Covent Garden between 1971 and 1986, he had an impossible act to follow in Georg Solti. Perceptions of a mid-career dip set in at home just when Davis’s unassuming authority was making the case for British conductors on the world stage.
Best documented of these extramural relationships was his stint with Amsterdam’s (not yet Royal) Concertgebouw Orchestra, which he first directed as early as 1966. Initial recording plans were stymied by clashing commitments. The Last Night of the Proms was never the happiest fit. ‘Power? It’s a disaster. Awful.’ Charisma? ‘Don’t know what it means. Do you?’ It was between January 1974 and January 1986 that the Philips label captured the nearly 16 hours of material sturdily rehoused now by Australian Eloquence. The well-illustrated booklet incorporates a clear-eyed assessment by Niek Nelissen. Otherwise the layout favours nostalgia over economy or logic.
Davis’s beloved Berlioz is represented by the second of his five commercially distributed Symphonie fantastiques. The players even joined the applause at the preceding concert, a rarity back then. Novel too was the inclusion of the obbligato cornet part in ‘Un bal’. With the first of Davis’s three Sibelius symphony cycles allocated to Boston, Haydn and Dvořák were pre-eminent in Amsterdam. By coincidence, LSO Live has remastered its overlapping Dvořák legacy in SACD format, taking in Davis’s remakes of Nos 7‑9, the previously overlooked Sixth and a one-off rendition of Smetana’s Má vlast. Also appended is Simon Rattle’s zippy account of Janáček’s Sinfonietta (10/20).
Back to Eloquence, where Davis’s 19 iconic Haydn symphonies occupy half the available disc-space. We begin logically with the earliest pieces – though Nos 82 and 83 were the last to be recorded – and a previously un-digitised surprise: No 84 with the same conductor and the English Chamber Orchestra (L’Oiseau-Lyre, 4/61). Gramophone reviewer Jeremy Noble was disturbed by ‘a certain dryness in Davis’s approach … his rhythms tend here to peck rather than to bounce’. Most striking is the broom-cupboard acoustic of Decca’s West Hampstead studio, a shock after all that sympathetically captured Concertgebouw resonance. It is easy to forget that HC Robbins Landon had only recently completed his critical edition of the symphonies when Davis returned to Haydn. Textual verisimilitude apart, he secures properly resilient playing from the strings, seeming to allow those wonderful woodwinds to do their thing without overt manipulation. Yet might all that patient scrupulousness and refinement start to feel beside the point in an age that rejects Enlightenment ideals? The ‘London’ Symphonies were the subject of Classics Reconsidered in October 2015 and already the implication is that a little more rusticity and humour would not go amiss. To put it another way, was this Military Symphony ever really rowdy enough?
Davis was never a stickler for ‘authenticity’ as currently understood. In Dvořák’s New World he takes the first-movement exposition repeat in both 1977 and 1999 – the broadly similar remake would launch the LSO’s in-house label. His Seventh had darkened by 2001, acquiring a potentially irritating mannerism in the finale. However, both versions make something big and brazen of its Molto maestoso denouement, a passage given come scritto when Nikolaus Harnoncourt tackled the same music in Amsterdam (Teldec, 12/98). There’s apocryphal horn doubling in both Davis first movements. For Philips he did the popular concertos with Salvatore Accardo and Heinrich Schiff, neither a first choice. Schiff remade the Cello Concerto in Vienna with Previn but how haunting to hear the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s naturally recessed first horn. Still better overall is Arthur Grumiaux’s dignified (third) version of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.
A champion of neglected Stravinsky as well as an acclaimed Mozartian at the commencement of his career, Davis recorded only the Russian ballets in Amsterdam. The sumptuous acoustic is untheatrical, the maestro scarcely natural casting for primitive orgiastic mayhem. While the mysterious quiet passages of The Rite work well enough, the slo-mo concluding gestures keep you waiting in the manner of Sibelius’s Fifth. The complete Firebird was largely dismissed in a recent Gramophone Collection (1/24) and Petrushka is not helped by some aberrant sound engineering. Similar balance problems affect an early digital pairing of Mussorgsky pops. Pictures at an Exhibition (in Ravel’s burnished orchestration) is not natural territory for a guide whose tepid approach to the linking Promenades lends the visit a perfunctory air. Rest assured that the best music-making here is on another plane of sympathetic integrity. Admirers, creaky or otherwise, need not hesitate.
The recordings
The Concertgebouw Legacy
Concertgebouw Orchestra / Colin Davis (Decca Eloquence)
Dvořák Symphonies 6-9, etc
LSO / Colin Davis (LSO Live)