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.
