by Long before he became a conductor, Andrew Davis was organist. As a teenager, he played the organ in the Palace Theater in Watford and studied at the Royal College of Music in the 1960s before becoming an organ teacher at King’s College in Cambridge. He started his professional career as a keyboardist for the St. Martin Academy in the fields.
In the last two years of his life, Davis returned to the music that had been his first love by making orchestral versions of some of JS Bach’s organ works. In 2023 he began to record a selection of his orchestations with the BBC Philharmonic for Chandos, but when he died in April last year, only four agreements were recorded the following September, and Martyn Brabbins joined the project with the orchestra.
The result is a sequence that begins with the Toccata and the Fugue in D minor, which Davis has relatively cautiously orchestrated, especially compared to the spectacular version that Leopold Stokowski fellow Walt Disney’s imagination, and it ends with the E -Flach -St. -Aann -Prel studies that are in the Bigger -Big -Big -Big -Big -Big -Big -Big -A -A -A -E -A -a -i -Requirements in which it is in the series in the series of A -Series -a -Serie -Araufungungen in advance, in advance and in advance of A series, in the series Any advance from A series. Freshly, but always thoroughly musical: For example, it becomes that the trio Super Lord Jesus Christ becomes a busy instrumental movement that could have come from the Brandenburg concerts. The most interesting of the arrangements, however, is the one that Davis has made for a decade earlier than all others from the Great Passacaglia and the Fugue in C minor, whose more demanding, almost pointillist orchestration on Webern’s famous version of the six-part Rizercare is reminiscent of Bach’s musical offer. It may be modest these pieces, but they are a touching monument to a fine, much missed conductor.
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