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   CLUB SANDWICH 58

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CARL DAVIS Club Sandwich 58

            Carl Davis, the man with whom Paul has been collaborating these past three years on his Liverpool Oratorio, is certainly no rookie when it comes to so-called serious music. His consummate knowledge of a wide range of styles has long marked him out as leader in a field of one.
            Though he's lived in London for three decades, Davis is a native New Yorker, born there in October 1936 (which presently makes him 54) and educated at the New England College of Music. But it was to olde England that Davis headed in 1961, when an off-Broadway revue he had co-written transferred to the London stage. Then, when the noted producer/impresario Ned Sherrin (who can still be heard weekly in his delightful Radio Four series Loose Ends) commissioned Davis to write music for the BBC's notorious satirical TV series TW3, Davis kicked-off a career in London that, for productivity, rivals even Mr McCartney's sizeable canon of work.
            The origin of the Liverpool Oratorio is discussed elsewhere in this issue, but one of the reasons that Paul was so attracted to the idea of working with Carl Davis was because of a quote that he read which went along the lines of, "It it moves, I'll score it." True Davis quotation or not, it neatly sums up the astonishing career of the American who has been labelled a musical genius on more than a few occasions.
            Though he's turned his hand to everything in the past 35 years (his left hand that is: like a certain other musical maestro we could name, Carl is a southpaw), it is perhaps for his work with silent movies that Carl is best known. A contradiction in terms, a music composer best known for silent movies? Actually, no, for Carl has written the music scores for an incredible 23 of them. And he doesn't just write the music: for the five-hour-long restored print of the 1925 epic Napoleon, he conducted the orchestra live in the pit at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square during the London premiere, synchronising throughout with the images on the screen. This awesome task - a triumphant success, incidentally - was, as Davis later rued, "Like standing in dead men's shoes". Acknowledged world leader in the art of so-called Live Cinema, Davis regularly undertakes similar performances in cities the world over and has personally conducted his score for the 142-minute Ben-Huron 35 occasions.
            And still his list of credits goes on. Davis wrote the unforgettable music for the 26-part Thames TV documentary The World At War, narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, and for the same company's Hollywood series and film The Naked Civil Servant (starring another McCartney friend, John Hurt), for the BBC's acclaimed Hotel du Lac and Channel 4's The Far Pavilions, for movies The Snow Goose, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Scandal, The Girl In A Swing and others far too numerous to mention. He's also worked once before with Liverpool Oratorio sopranist Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, recording the album Christmas With Kiri, a crossover chart hit in 1986.
            As one might imagine, time is the only stumbling block in the life of Carl Davis. One recent season saw him conducting orchestras in Manchester, London, Liverpool, Luxembourg, Rotterdam, Baltimore and Munich (where he is principal guest conductor), all the while returning to London to be with his actress wife Jean Boht and two daughters. But podium-stepping does have its compensations - as Davis says, "Conducting live concerts is an antidote to life in the studio, and the feedback from the orchestra stimulates me as a composer". If you're Carl Davis, then, work leads to yet more work. Which doesn't leave much time for professed hobbies reading, gardening and cooking.
            Clearly, Paul McCartney could scarcely be holding hands with a better qualified person than Carl Davis as he enters the precarious and slightly daunting world of classical music.

Club Sandwich 58