Music Matters on Colin Davis

[sawyl]

Wonderful feature on Colin Davis on Music Matters, which draw on interviews with friends and recordings from the BBC's archive to present a fascinating portrait of a deeply complex man. Particularly interesting where the pieces on Davis' transformation from the nervous, ambitious, abrasive conductor of his early days into the mellow and much-loved person he later became. According to an extremely candid archive interview with Anthony Clare, Davis realised, aged 35, that he didn't much like the person he'd become:

I said to myself: my boy, this won't do. And I set out to tame myself. To put all this energy into a more positive form. And to overcome these obscene bouts of bad temper. And so I set out to change myself as far as I could. And I'm still on this journey.

The rests of the interviews were good, but the highlight was an archive recording from the early 70s of Davis in conversation with Michael Tippett:

Davis:	You stretch the technical capabilities of your players with great glee, beyond anything they ever thought they could do.
Tippett:	Glee isn't really the right word. I do it because I'm forced. Partly because, you said much early on, am I looking at means of doing these things. When you start recreating the means and making them alive, things do happen. But also I think, at the back of it too, is the feeling that I still have that the orchestral ensemble, which in the period of Rimsky-Korsakov is so wonderfully balanced and so forth, we're remaking the orchestras all the time. So we've got this position where we remake everything [ Tippett briefly becomes impossible to follow as he talks a mile a minute ] Then you do find stretching, though you don't mean it only in the form of stretching techniques. I think, as you will know because you've been rehearsing all the time, that at lot of it is stretching all the sounds that go with sounds, not merely the question of playing further up the keyboard.
Davis:	No, it's making instruments make different kinds of sounds that they may not have made...
Tippett:	And together....
Davis:	And it happens to be difficult...
Tippett:	Yes, it happens to be difficult...
Davis:	It does!

At which point they both laugh themselves stupid. It's quite, quite wonderful.