Long earlier than he grew to change into a conductor, Andrew Davis was once an organist. As a baby he had played the organ at the Palace theatre, Watford, and within the 1960s studied at the Royal School of Song earlier than turning into organ scholar at King’s School, Cambridge; he began his official occupation as the keyboard participant for the Academy of St Martin within the Fields.

Within the last two years of his lifestyles, Davis returned to the music that had been his first relish by making orchestral versions of some of JS Bach’s organ works. In 2023, he began to story a series of his orchestrations with the BBC Philharmonic for Chandos, but when he died in April last 12 months correct four arrangements had been recorded, and Martyn Brabbins stepped in to total the challenge with the orchestra the next September.

The consequence is a series that begins with the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which Davis has orchestrated in a moderately restrained methodology, especially when put next 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, whereas in between there may maybe be a series of chorale preludes, organized like the larger works in an unshowy but always thoroughly musical methodology: to illustrate, the Trio vast Herr Jesu Christ, Dich zu U.s.Wend becomes a busy instrumental circulation that would even possess come out of the Brandenburg Concertos. Basically the most fascinating of the arrangements, even though, is the one who Davis made a decade earlier than the total relaxation, of the substantial Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, whose extra fastidious, nearly pointillist orchestration remembers Webern’s smartly-known version of the six-portion ricercare from Bach’s Musical Providing. Modest these pieces will almost certainly be, but they are a touching memorial to a elegant, grand missed conductor.

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