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Complex 20th-century scores like Stravinsky\u2019s 1946 Symphony in Three Movements held no terrors for him. A 2022 recording with the BBC Philharmonic demonstrates his mastery of the work\u2019s turbulent polyphony. When he was a student at Cambridge, he was casually asked if he wanted to conduct Schoenberg\u2019s fearsome Five Pieces for Orchestra; he blithely accepted, and it was only \u201cyears later you realize how fiendishly difficult it is,\u201d he remembered, laughing at himself, in an interview with Peter Sagal of NPR two years ago.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhenever he comes to conduct, you can just see his love of the music, He\u2019s so excited. It just sort of pours out of his body,\u201d Abbey Edlin, a French horn player in the Melbourne orchestra, said in a video tribute<\/a>.<\/p>\n The British opera critic Alan Blyth, writing in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, described Mr. Davis as a \u201cconductor whose technical skill was enhanced by an inborn enthusiasm for and dedication to the task in hand that he was able to transfer to the forces before him.\u201d in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.<\/p>\n Yet his early-career move into conducting \u2014 he was a prestigious Organ Scholar at King\u2019s College, Cambridge \u2014 was, in his understated telling, almost an afterthought. \u201cI got interested in conducting sort of by accident,\u201d he told Mr. Sagal. He had been invited to conduct a Haydn divertimento, he recalled, and \u201cI thought, well, I rather like this.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI liked being able to bring a group together,\u201d he explained. \u201cI suppose the basis of my conducting technique, such as it is, started early.\u201d<\/p>\n His instinctual approach to conducting served him well in opera. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led almost 700 performances of 62 operas, by 22 composers. There were also many performances at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the Bayreuth Festival and elsewhere.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n