Colin Davis (1927-2013) at home
by Ken
As I must have mentioned, one of my core LPs in the early getting-to-know-music stage was a budget Seraphim issue of a disc of Mozart overtures conducted by Colin Davis early in his career. There were fine performances of all these indispensable pieces, and my recollection is that I played that LP a lot.
The subject of my complicated feelings about Sir Colin, who died on April 15 at 85, as a conductor has come up occasionally in these posts, and I'm afraid I'm going to need to rehash it in order to memorialize him properly, though I'm going to want to stress the truly wonderful things he did. The thing is, those truly wonderful things, which were often quite unexpected (who, for example, would have expected a great recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde from him?) tended to be a lot less heralded than a lot of stick-waving hackery.
I don't have those fine old EMI Mozart overtures on CD, and so tonight, since I happen to have some consideration of one of the characters of Mozart's Magic Flute in mind, I thought we'd let Sir Colin give us a taste from his 1984 Philips recording of the opera -- not a great performance by any means, but a pretty good one. We hear first Davis's Overture, which we've actually heard before.
MOZART: The Magic Flute, K. 620: Overture
Staatskapelle Dresden, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded January 1984
Now we hear the bird-catcher Papageno's two ever-familiar, ever-beloved ditty-like songs.
