Carl Davis

Carl Davis0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Carl Davis0:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week our castaway is the composer and conductor Carl Davies.

Presenter0:35

Carl, you live, presumably, a sort of split personality life. Half the time you're locked away composing, and the other half you're in the hurly burley of film and television studios and and the theatre. Which is the real you?

Presenter0:48

But I think they both are. The term schizophrenic implies two parts. So there can't be one without the other. I'm locked away in my studio composing, so that I may then enter the marketplace. We're allowing you to take just eight discs. What's the first one?

Presenter1:03

First one is a cantata by the German composer Dietrich Bux de Hude called Aperite Miki Portasiustizie.

Presenter1:14

I heard it first on a radio programme in New York.

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And as well as being a very beautiful piece in itself, it's very beautifully performed by Danish artists, especially the the tenor on it, Axel Schütz, who's very well known and and indeed had a career in England after the war. And I loved the piece very much and sought out the seventy-eight and played it obsessively. It just seemed to me a most wonderful kind of balanced and pure

Presenter1:43

Piece of music and one that could take repeated listenings, as indeed when I was a child, I did listen to it over and over again.

Speaker 31:51

Aperita, Aperita, Aperita, Aperisa, Aperita, Aperita, Aperita, Mini Bo, Mini Bo, Minibo, Paper.

Presenter1:55

A very literal.

Carl Davis1:59

Believe her.

Carl Davis2:04

Oh very

Carl Davis2:06

Yeah.

Speaker 32:18

No free.

Speaker 42:20

We are happy.

Speaker 42:22

Upper Refer, Apparent, Apparently Port Just Just

Speaker 32:33

Inquest.

Speaker 32:40

We draw within Christ to kill.

Presenter2:50

The opening of a Buxtehude Cantate recorded in Copenhagen in nineteen forty six.

Presenter2:57

You come from a musical family, Carl?

Presenter2:59

Not especially, though it was a family in which there was music always around me. My mother played piano and very early on I insisted on having piano lessons and insisted that she then play fourhands with me. This was probably a strain on her, but at any rate she was cooperative. My grandfather, that is her father, was also very musical, sang very well and played the flute. But I must say that the real stimulus for music was really just being in New York City. Was music your first ambition?

Presenter3:28

Yes, it was. But at a certain point I got diverted into painting. And during my late childhood and and early adolescence I actually painted quite a bit. And then I found

Carl Davis3:37

And then

Presenter3:39

The more I was involved in music, the less I painted. But I still have retained my interest in painting and try and and actually collect paintings if I can. So what happened when you left school?

Presenter3:50

I had a very checkered

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Education and left school for jobs and then went back to school again and did a kind of toing and froing. The real moment I left school was when I was offered a very spectacular job playing for the Robert Shaw Chorale as a pianist. He had actually come up to the music conservatory where I was studying. That was one of the three colleges that I went to in America. This was a college in Boston, and Robert Shaw came up to prepare the choir for a recording of the complete Daphnis and Chloe of Revelle. None of the

Presenter4:22

Choral pianists for the people who were playing for rehearsals, they all got too frightened to play because it's a very, very elaborate score. And so finally they the cheeky New Yorker in Boston, they said, Would I would I do it? and I said, Well, of course I would, because I was dying to work with Robert Shaw, who was legendary in the States. He's not well known here, but then he was really very important. And I prepared the revell very carefully and

Presenter4:48

Played it as well as I could, and he offered me a job playing for his choir, so I left.

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the Conservatory to tour with the Chalkras, which was the the first professional job I'd ever had. How old were you then? I was eighteen. Eighteen, is that all? One hears them on various kinds of records. It was in the main a a concert group.

Carl Davis4:58

That's all.

Presenter5:06

Yes, yes. He started, oddly enough, doing much more commercial things, playing with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, which was a very popular ra light music radio programme. And then he came to the notice of Toscanini in the forties and became the choir leader for, or prepared the choruses at any rate, for all the Toscaninis from the mid forties on into the early fifties. And then he formed his own group, which did his extensive tours of the States, doing very ambitious programmes, not light music at all, but we did things like Mozart Requiem and Honeger's King David, Bach Magnificent, Kristlag and Todespond. I mean endless thing. And it was absolutely fabulous for me at the age of eighteen to actually be seeing the States in that particular way, not as a tourist, but someone who arrives in a town.

Carl Davis5:11

How to make coffee left.

Carl Davis5:24

Yeah.

Presenter5:46

Making these incredible journeys over all these uh um this particular variety of landscapes. Let's have your second record. What's that? Well, my second record is a movement from a Beethoven quartet, the Alla Danza Tedesca, from the quartet in B F major opus one thirty. The thing I like about this movement is that there's a sort of laughter through tears atmosphere to it, and it just has a particular emotion I think will help me preserve a kind of equilibrium on the island.

Presenter7:18

The Hungarian Quartet, the opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, opus one hundred and thirty. How long were you with the Robert Shaw choral? I worked for him across two years, doing the three tours and then preparing I had a marvellous summer where we prepared three albums in which I just was involved in the preparation. And um it was at that point that I

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really had to make a decision about

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two-pronged career I was having because it was while I was on these tours that I started composing, perhaps stimulated by the fact that I was surrounded by singers and musicians. And uh I decided I would go back to college because I felt that there was something in the compositions which might be fresh and uh went back to a little college in Upper New York City called Bard College where I had a chance to try out and really

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experience for the first time virtually all the things that I am doing to day here in London.

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And uh

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I had a very, very good two years. At the end of the two years, I was immediately snapped up to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico and spend the summer at Santa Fe. This was in nineteen fifty eight. And then that year also then worked as an assistant conductor for two seasons at the New York City Opera. But at the same time, a little review that I wrote in college was produced off-Broadway and I played that for the six months of its run. It did very well. It was called Diversions. It was put on in the autumn and winter of 58, 59 and won a prize, off-Broadway prize. And at the end of that I suddenly thought, well, I have a dilemma. I could go on playing piano for the rest of my life and obviously all that would go well and I would you know probably get into the Met or whatever. There was that sort of path indicated. But on the other hand, I didn't think I would ever write anything if I stayed in New York. So I decided I had to leave. And you came to London?

Presenter9:12

Eventually, I came to London. Where did you go? In between. I spent about eight months in Copenhagen, in Denmark. Why Copenhagen? Well, I had some Danish friends in New York, and I was just a little bit frightened about coming immediately to one of the big centers. It's a very special place, quite unique, very humane.

Carl Davis9:19

Yeah.

Speaker 39:19

Copenhagen

Presenter9:32

Very gentle.

Presenter9:34

And in its way not competitive, rather limited in in its view of things. And I enjoyed it. At the same time knowing after a very short time that it couldn't possibly hold me. You came to London where things were more competitive. Well, where I thought things were livelier. Yeah. Certainly. If you look back on London in the spring of fifty nine and sixty.

Carl Davis9:45

So you came to London where things are more competitive.

Presenter9:56

You realize it was a terribly exciting town. And so I thought this was the place. Also, this little review that I'd done in New York was bought by an English empresario, Oscar Lewinstein, who said, I'll do it at the Edinburgh Festival in 1961. So there was a little bit of incentive to come here. And indeed, I've been here ever since. Well, for the first time, here you are in the lush fields of British music and theatre. So let's break off at this point for your third record. The third record is a very specific souvenir of an extraordinary event that I participate in, and that is the screening of the Abel Gonz-Simon film Napoleon, which we perform with a live orchestra. And I have composed and compiled the score for that version. It is nearly five hours of music and five hours of screen time. And I've chosen for my third record the last movement from the Beethoven Seventh Symphony, which I play as part of my compilation to celebrate the end of the terror, that part of the revolution. And this extraordinary event of Napoleon, one of the great films and the most innovative and extraordinary and energizing films, has been reconstructed by Kevin Brown, though not quite to its full length. It was screened in 1927 at six hours, but of course a lot of it has been lost.

Presenter11:17

So we we have nearly five hours, which is the the most complete up to this moment that can be, but we are hopeful of finding more and one day screening the full six hours. I perform this with the Wren Orchestra.

Presenter11:30

They've done all my performances. In July I did my tenth performance at the Bristol Hippodrome and now we're doing it at the Barbican, my eleventh and twelfth performance. This event or this way of showing these films is is quite unique in my experience. It's not like sound film where you know that everything is going to be all right. It has all the sort of trapeze act of the live performance plus the endless visual availability and sophistication of the screen.

Presenter11:58

When we've got it right, when I get everything to fit and I get the music right, it is really quite unique and not like anything else. And when I hear this piece on my desert island, I'll be remembering the extraordinary exhilaration and fatigue perhaps of getting through getting through these marathons.

Presenter13:17

The beginning of the last movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony, Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter13:24

So let's go back to the time when you arrived in London. Was there a lot of fuss about work permits and all that sort of thing?

Presenter13:31

I was actually quite fortunate and really after I think it was three years I received permission to land. So you did your review at the Edinburgh Festival. Then later that came into London and it had rather a wonderful cast Fanella Fielding and Anton Rogers, Michael Williams and Anne Beach. They were smashing. It had many titles. In Edinburgh it was called Diversions and in London it was called Twists.

Carl Davis13:40

So you did your review

Carl Davis13:42

Yeah.

Speaker 313:43

Yeah.

Speaker 313:49

What was it called?

Carl Davis13:50

Uh

Presenter13:56

And it ran at the Arts Theatre for a month and uh it didn't develop any further than that, though we did do a production in Germany which was uh very amusing. The thing that was good about it is that it had

Presenter14:08

Very interesting notices, and a lot of people in the business came to see it.

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And it was really out of that that I made two important contacts. One was that a lot of people from the BBC came and I got a chance to do some radio and then eventually some television background music. Almost the first thing you did for radio won an Italia Prize. That wasn't bad. Yes, that was quite a good start, I thought. And that spurred you to write a television opera. Yes. The arrangement. A couple of things happened. One is I'd done this rather successful radio work and one of the producers in radio moved across to television and that was Cedric Messina. At the same time I'd also done a television musical for what was called ABC, which changed into Thames television. And the man who was the head of drama of that department, and this was now in the very early 60s, was called Sidney Newman. And he then became head of drama at the BBC. He wanted to do a series of operas which would be written by people who were not writing for concert hall but were writing in the theatre and for television. And so he commissioned a series of operas that were produced by Cedric in that slot. And mine was one of the first done in that way.

Carl Davis14:35

The Orange

Carl Davis14:44

Yeah.

Presenter15:16

Well, so there you were, launched on this non-stop production line of television and films and radio that's been going on ever since.

Speaker 315:21

Yeah.

Speaker 315:22

Yeah.

Presenter15:22

Yeah.

Speaker 315:22

Hmm.

Presenter15:23

Well let's have another record.

Presenter15:25

Well, my fourth selection is again a personal one, and that is a selection from the magic flute, the quintet from the first act. And when I made this choice, I asked for a very specific recording, which was the Thomas Beecham recording made in 1937 and 38. And one reason I asked for it, aside from thinking that it is the most joyous and ingenious and moving work written for the stage, well certainly one of them, but this particular recording was one that I heard all the time in New York. On all the music stations, this performance was repeatedly played, and so it would be again a kind of nostalgia.

Speaker 316:14

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 316:16

There are kan vonstraber sagenzein esprater is die. Ich cann this tuvas dieklagen, my lichtu schwa wohelmen wing.

Carl Davis16:20

Master

Speaker 316:33

Is cannot

Speaker 316:35

Nice dispel

Speaker 316:38

My name is Tru Shaba to help

Speaker 316:43

Mine is too smart to help at me. My name is Tushma to help me.

Speaker 316:59

Noon tow the f ⁇

Carl Davis16:59

Uh

Presenter17:07

The quintet from the first act of Sir Thomas Beecham's recording of the magic flute.

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Now let's talk first of all about your stage work. You've worked quite a lot for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Yes, I've done about a dozen productions for them. Which ones do you remember with the most pleasure? Well, I th did

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Quite a

Presenter17:27

Good production of The Devil's Disciple with Jack Gold, who is someone I'd done a a terrific amount of television and film. I did a very nice production of Ivanov, the Chekhov play, with David Jones, who used me quite consistently at the Aldwich, and I did a lovely production of Much Ado About Nothing up at Stratford with Ronald Ayre. And of course there's the regular bread and butter of television. Yes. You must have done countless shows. Yes, I can't count them.

Carl Davis17:47

You must

Presenter17:52

How does it work? How does a composer present his music? I I presume he does a piano score which he plays th to the director in the first place. Yes, you can do that and I d I quite like doing that. Um some composers object to it and think they'll give a bad idea, but I think it's important that I mean there's one terrifying moment for me which is that you arrive in the studio when an orchestra of seventy-five is there and you run through the music and the director says

Presenter18:17

Well, I know I said it should be fast, but I'm can you do it slow? Or vice versa, which is even worse. So uh I try and do as thorough a briefing as I can, but it may not always work. Sometimes the director has said, Well, I know, but now that I hear it But if if I can eradicate perhaps, you know, seventy five percent of

Presenter18:39

the possible revision so that the the director knows more or less what I'm doing. It's better, it goes faster. Then you don't have to call back seventy-five musicians and do it again. Quite not that I get a chance to work with seventy five musicians that often, but anyway, something like that. It's a nice thing to think about. Hmm. Record number five.

Presenter18:55

Well, I'm going to choose a little bit of Westside story from the original Broadway cast. I was still in New York the year that it was produced. And at that time, this felt very contemporary and dealt with sort of an atmosphere of of living in New York. So it's very nostalgic about New York.

Speaker 319:17

Prize for all

Speaker 319:19

Thus silver of brace for us, Peace and quiet and open air wait for slayer.

Presenter19:42

somewhere from the original New York production of West Side Story.

Presenter19:46

How many feature films have you done, Carl?

Presenter19:48

Ooh, that's hard. I would need to prepare for that question.

Presenter19:53

I'd say there have been two striking feature films of the ones I've done. One was the very first one I did, called The Bofors Gun, which again was with Jack with an extraordinary central performance from Nicole Williamson. And then the most uh recent one, which has been very major for me, which is The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I did with Carol Rice. That we've all done well by. It's been a very successful film, and I won BAFTA for it, and I won the Ivanovello for it, and it's been very good for me. But it uses the cumulative experience that I've had in working with directors in television and trying to kind of

Presenter20:28

very subtly bring out strands of people's thoughts and people's feelings. On a feature film, at what stage is the composer brought in? It can vary, but I would say in the main, after it's all done, the music is one of the last steps of the work on a film before the dub. In the main, you're brought in to look at the film during the editing process. It's very rare that you're asked to do much before. In fact, you may not even be heard until after the film is shot. They may not have made the decision. And then he's writing stopwatch in hand? Always, yes. But now we have this wonderful tool of being able to use video so that we all can have the picture in front of us as well. Of course, that's a great step forward. The composer, of course, does the scoring. Does he carry the whole thing through? Does he book the musicians? Conduct the session? These things can be delegated. It just depends on the individual. What I do is conduct my own performances on film, though not all all composers do this, but I like to. I feel I can communicate the feeling of the music, though perhaps other people may do it more tidily. But I also know the film.

Carl Davis21:14

Duck the session

Presenter21:32

Which is important. I know w where things should land. I don't have to tell anybody this.

Presenter21:37

You've written a symphony?

Presenter21:39

Yes, it's a symphony about London. And it was commissioned by Capitol Radio two years ago, and we performed it at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. And their only stipulation was that it be about London. And I had to think of what could I do about London, or what would I do, and there is already a highly successful London symphony by Vaughan Williams. And I thought one way was perhaps to use my literary associations by choosing four quotes to preface each movement. So each movement was quite specifically defined. We weren't doing in pure scenic description. It's the first symphony to list a cash register among the instruments. Yes, yes, it's true. I mean, I'll continue with the cash register. The cash register is a sort of possible movable fee. So it is a sort of an eye-catcher.

Carl Davis22:12

It's a first.

Carl Davis22:15

Yeah.

Presenter22:24

Actually the at the performance we did for it Croydon, the poor percussionist, you see, got his finger caught in the

Presenter22:30

And I just kept thinking, now should I specify which key, you know, what what the price was at that particular moment, you see. But and then I also realized that I had to score for the drawer being closed.'Cause there were two sounds. I really wanted it for the ga ding of the bell. And then what if you did that, the drawer opens. So at what point do you close the drawer with a sort of

Speaker 322:31

And I just kept

Speaker 322:45

The valve

Presenter22:52

So there had to be two musical indications. I'm not sure about the cash register anymore. But anyway, we are going to do it again in April 83 Festival Hall. So it'll have its proper London premiere.

Carl Davis23:01

Right.

Presenter23:04

Yeah.

Presenter23:05

Record number six.

Presenter23:07

Well, I wanted to choose for my desert island one souvenir of the ballet, which is a great love of mine. So I've chosen a section from Igostravinsky's Ballet, The Rite of Spring. What I like about it is its modernity. You feel you you are emphatically in the twentieth century. You it couldn't have been written any other time. It's clashing dissonances and emphatic rhythms.

Presenter24:32

Igor Stravensky himself conducting his Rite of Spring, and that was the dance of the adolescents. Now, you talked about your work fitting a score to the revival of Abel Gonci's magnificent Napoleon film, all Five Hours of It. And you've also made a score for King Vidor's 1928 film, The Crowd, a very different sort of film. Yes, yes. What happened was that at our premiere performance November 30th, 1980, Jeremy Isaacs, who was at that time just beginning to put together the fourth channel,

Carl Davis24:51

Yeah.

Presenter25:05

said that he would commission a series of classic silence from Thames television with music by Carl Davis. And what happened is that we did the first one at the last London Film Festival, which was The Crowd, and now I'm at this moment preparing two films for the next London Film Festival. May we know what these two films are? Yes. The first is a film called Flesh and the Devil, which was the first Hollywood film in which Greta Garbo became a star.

Presenter25:33

Um we're pairing that and doing in repertoire a comedy by King Vidor called Show People which stars Marion Davis.

Presenter25:42

Record number 7.

Presenter25:44

Right. Well, this is a record that I'm very fond of and used to play a lot in London. I arrived at an appreciation of jazz and that whole scene, oddly enough, not while I was in New York. I'm I'm a creature of opposites, so that while I was in New York and in America I was thirsty for Europe, and now in these years in London I became you know very hungry for certain things that were archetypally American. And what I would like uh to choose is a Billy Holiday version of the song My Man.

Presenter26:16

And what it has is, first of all, Billy Hardy's superb jazz phrasing.

Presenter26:21

as well as a great depth of feeling mixed with that. Um I think it's a superb performance and it's one that I would never tire of listening to.

Speaker 326:32

Or whatever my man is

Speaker 326:37

I'm here.

Speaker 326:42

Blah

Presenter26:58

Billy Holiday

Presenter27:00

Carl, how do you stack up when things become rough? Could you cope with the rigours of Desert Island Life? Well, I've deliberated about this uh question of how would I cope? And I thought, well, when you come to ask me on what book I would choose, I c I've been thinking, well, perhaps I should ask Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps that will offer me some clues, or perhaps a huge DIY manual. On Desert Island Life? I doubt if that's the way it is. Unless the tool chest from the wreckage of the ship or whatever managed to arrive. So I don't really know. My feeling is that I would survive, albeit messily.

Carl Davis27:22

On

Carl Davis27:24

I well the

Presenter27:39

Right.

Presenter27:40

So you could rig up a rather messy shelter. Yes, uh not ineffective. I keep working on it, but I don't think it would be very tidally turned. What about food? Have you done any fishing? I have done what I call easy fishing. Is that if you give me a pond that is very heavily stocked, I'm bound to catch something. Well you are, yes. No, that doesn't count. In other words, you've done no fishing.

Presenter28:01

What about cultivation? Oh, well, I'm quite interested in gardening and um you know the courgettes and the tomatoes are quite healthy at this very moment. Any ideas on escaping?

Presenter28:11

I think I'd be rather frightened of having of any boat that I would make.

Carl Davis28:13

Yeah.

Speaker 328:13

You have any

Presenter28:16

If you did make one, could you sail it?

Presenter28:20

Up to last year I would have said yes, why not? But since then I've done some music for Claire Frances's series, The Commanding Sea, and that has put me off sea travel except except on highly mechanized vehicles. Well, stay where you are, Carl. We'll do our best. And let's have your last record.

Presenter28:37

This last record is a souvenir of an extraordinary occasion, and it's one that I'm very, very proud of, and that is that I for years have admired the talents of Barry Humphreys, especially in his creation, Dame Edna Everidge. And I approached Barry and said, What about putting the dame in the context of a great national event, a great day or great evening for Australia, in which we back her with a chorus and a big orchestra and the Albert Hall and we go to town on it. Would that appeal to you? And so Barry said, yes, I'd love to, because Darry's a great music lover. And so we had a wonderful time.

Presenter29:17

assembling this evening, which we called The Last Night of the Palms, and after the interval there was a terrific fanfare and Dey Medna came on and the choir came on and so on and we performed this cantata called The Song of Australia, which was the entire history of Australia in thirty five minutes.

Presenter29:34

as from the dame's eye view.

Presenter29:36

And the finale of it was a great anthem called Why Do I Love Australia? which was the dame's tribute to her native country. And at the end of it

Presenter29:47

It swelled to an enormous climax. Everything was going. And then at the end, with a thunderous ovation, we actually taught the song to the audience, and the entire sold out Albert Hall stood gladdie in hand.

Presenter30:02

And I conducted with a Gladi, and there was this L S O, ninety strong, sixty voice, New Antipodean singers, the Albert Hall organ, and the dame leading this sort of congregation and this almost religious experience of singing, Why Do We Love Australia?

Presenter30:22

And as I stood there conducting I shed the Gladiator Wild a rather unwieldy baton I thought, This surely must be the maddest moment of my life.

Speaker 330:55

We know that single we cost so much to go there And the chance is all we need

Presenter31:04

An emotional moment with Dame Edna. If you could take only one disc of the HU Plato's car, which would it be? I think I would take the magic flute. And one luxury? Right. I've pondered this and I decided I would like a very expensive shampoo, because I think I'd get a lot of salt in my hair. All right, a good supply of that, because you may be there for a long time. Now, your book, you've already said you wanted something useful, a kind of...

Presenter31:30

Uh Castaway's Guide or Do It Yourself? Yes, in the end I had to discard that idea and I decided what would I really like to keep reading as my guide for a choice. So I decided I would really like a very large collection, if not the complete short stories of Chekhov.

Speaker 331:32

Yeah.

Carl Davis31:32

Yeah.

Presenter31:46

Well, we'll give you as much as we can get into one large volume. And thank you, Carl Davis, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you, Roy. It was a great pleasure to be here. Goodbye, everyone.

Carl Davis32:03

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.