Long before he became a conductor, Andrew Davis was an organist. As a teenager he had played the organ at the Palace theatre, Watford, and in the 1960s studied at the Royal College of Music before becoming organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge; he began his professional career as the keyboard player for the Academy of St Martin 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 orchestrations with the BBC Philharmonic for Chandos, but when he died in April last year just four arrangements had been recorded, and Martyn Brabbins stepped in to complete the project with the orchestra the following September.
The result is a sequence that begins with the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which Davis has orchestrated in a relatively restrained way, especially when compared with the spectacular version that Leopold Stokowski famously concocted for Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and it ends with the E flat St Anne Prelude and Fugue, while in between there is a series of chorale preludes, arranged like the bigger works in an unshowy but always thoroughly musical way: for instance, the Trio super Herr Jesu Christ, Dich zu Uns Wend becomes a busy instrumental movement that could have come out of the Brandenburg Concertos. The most interesting of the arrangements, though, is the one that Davis made a decade earlier than all the rest, of the great Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, whose more fastidious, almost pointillist orchestration recalls Webern’s famous version of the six-part ricercare from Bach’s Musical Offering. Modest these pieces may be, but they are a touching memorial to a fine, much missed conductor.
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