One night in 1938, a young Colin Davis elbowed his way into the living room of the modest terraced home that he shared with his mother, father, and six siblings, and placed a record on the turntable of the family’s battered wind-up gramophone.
Turning up the volume, and ignoring the scratchy sound quality, he quickly became lost in ‘the power, the tenderness, the beauty [and] the ferocity’ of the opening passages of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.
‘It was a revelation,’ Davis recalled years later. ‘I had never heard so much energy concentrated into half an hour.’
From that day onwards, the 11-year-old schoolboy had a single aim in life. ‘I wanted to be a musician and I wanted to be a conductor,’ he said, jokingly describing it as ‘the most irrational decision that I have ever made’.
So began a journey of extraordinary endeavour which finally came to an end last Sunday, after bringing Davis international acclaim, along with two Grammy Awards and a knighthood.
Sir Colin died on April 14, after a short illness. Aged 85, he leaves behind seven children from two marriages.
The boy who had listened in awe to that tinny pre-war gramophone would go on to spend more than 50 years at the summit of his profession, and is now regarded as the greatest British conductor of his generation.
Determined: Sir Colin Davis, pictured at home with his pet iguana, died on April 14
He would defy an impoverished background to preside over some of the loftiest institutions in the land, from the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), Royal Opera House, and English National Opera, to the BBC’s Symphony and English Chamber orchestras.
Sir Colin was born in Weybridge, Surrey, in 1927, the fifth of seven children of Lillian and Reginald, a bank clerk badly traumatised by his experiences in World War I and prone to drinking too much. He found it difficult to keep a job and ran into debt in the Depression.
‘We didn’t have electricity,’ Sir Colin later recalled. ‘We had a zinc bath in front of the coal fire with all these slippery kids jumping in and out.
‘There wasn’t any light, except for the fire. It was all rather humble.’
However Reginald — who Sir Colin later described as ‘that poor man’ because his life was so hard — was fond of classical music and the run-down home contained a gramophone and a small collection of records, which his son listened to avidly. His mother maintained he knew which labels brought out which music before he could even read properly.
Humble beginnings: Sir Colin grew up in a terraced house with his six siblings
Talent: Davis's big break came when he stepped in for lead conductor Otto Kemplerer with the BBC Scottish Orchestra
Aged 11, thanks to a bequest from a relative, Colin was sent to the independent Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, West Sussex, where he was bullied because of his social background, but became an accomplished clarinet player.
He practised it so frequently at home that a neighbour sent a note to complain about the noise and suggested that he: ‘Put a sock in it’.
At 16, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.
But his inability to play piano meant he was not allowed to join the conducting class.
Instead, he was forced to focus on the clarinet, and spent his National Service playing the instrument with the band of the Household Cavalry.
In 1949, he married April Cantelo, an up-and-coming young soprano he’d met at college.
She quickly had two children. But while her career was starting to go places, his was stalling. He found himself conducting local choirs — he had learnt the art by carefully observing conductors while playing clarinet — and tutoring in Cambridge to earn a crust.
Sir Colin won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music at the age of 16
‘He was obviously not born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ April Cantelo told me from her home in Oxfordshire this week. ‘My career took off before his, because I was a young singer and there are more opportunities for a young singer than a young conductor.
‘So he had to do his share of the babysitting, which was probably frustrating.’
In 1957, aged 30, Sir Colin finally emerged — after three failed attempts — from what he called ‘the amateur wilderness’ to gain his first full-time job, as an assistant conductor for the BBC Scottish Orchestra.
Two years later, he got what is now widely regarded as his big break: the lead conductor, Otto Klemperer, fell ill, leaving Davis to replace him conducting Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni at the Royal Festival Hall, starring celebrated soprano Joan Sutherland. The critics were hugely impressed.
Then in 1960, he got a coveted slot at Glyndebourne.
Shortly afterwards, Time magazine proclaimed him: ‘The most promising conducting talent to appear in England since Sir Thomas Beecham [the early 20th-century orchestral giant] himself rose to fame.’
Newspapers soon became more intrigued, however, by tales of Sir Colin’s combustible relationship with his musicians.
Colleagues described him as a relentless perfectionist, with an abrasive attitude to staff.
There were reports of tantrums, shouting matches, and of players refusing to appear in his orchestras.
‘I was a raw young man, and they were a pretty ferocious bunch of pirates,’ he recalled in 2007, of his early encounters with the LSO — which he first conducted in 1959. ‘There were no women in the orchestra, except for a harpist who smoked a pipe. And we had lots of battles.’
Players often arrived at concerts drunk, he claimed in later interviews — and they hated taking direction from a short-tempered conductor in his 30s. ‘I was a young man and they were older,’ he said. ‘I think they were rather resentful. . . and I don’t think I handled it very well.’
At the same time, his private life was imploding. In 1964, it emerged that he had split from April Cantelo and taken up with his children’s young Iranian au pair, Ashraf Naini, who was known as Shamsi.
Under a glare of publicity, the couple were forced to marry not only in Tehran, but also in the UK to satisfy the authorities that their relationship was genuine.
April Cantelo, now 85, explained their traumatic split by saying: ‘We’d had a wonderful life together in our time, and a lot of it was very, very happy. But he was fiercely committed to music.
‘And of course we were both very young, just 21 when we married.’
Sir Colin’s second marriage was more of a success. He and Shamsi went on to have five children, and stayed together for 46 years, until her death from cancer in 2010.
At work, Sir Colin remained volatile. In 1971, he succeeded the distinguished Sir Georg Solti as the musical director at the Royal Opera.
Acclaim: As a conductor, Sir Colin spent more than 50 years at the summit of his profession
Headlines: Sir Colin attracted publicity after high-profile rows with some members of the London Symphony Orchestra
But regulars in the audience missed his predecessor, and would boo at first nights. He began to respond by booing back.
Critics publicly called for his resignation, after which Sir Colin upped the ante by sticking his tongue out at disapproving members of the audience.
He also spoke publicly of his distaste for trendy modern opera, and talked of ‘awful scenes’ backstage when he objected to a director’s approach.
Little wonder that when Sir Colin finally left the Royal Opera in 1986, sighs of relief were reported from management.
He elected to spend several years in relative seclusion, taking up low-profile posts in Germany.
By the time he returned to London in the Nineties his combustible reputation had largely disappeared. And when he was appointed Principal Conductor of the LSO in 1995, a long-awaited maturity began to emerge.
So began the most critically-acclaimed period of Sir Colin’s career. Musicians spoke of a warm working environment in his orchestras, and tickets to his concerts were among the most sought-after in London.
He won two Grammy awards, in 2002 and 2006, and was twice named Male Artist of the Year at the Classical Brits, most recently in 2008.
Colleagues who worked for Sir Colin in recent years describe the former enfant terrible as a mellow and somewhat eccentric boss, who would knit colourful scarves and even cook home-made curries for his staff.
He was once named pipe-smoker of the year.
Accolades: Sir Colin won two Grammy awards in 2002 and 2006 and was twice named Male Artist of the Year at the Classical Brits
‘Colin wasn’t a tyrant, in the sense of losing his temper and bullying people,’ says Meirion Bowen, the musician and writer.
‘And although he did set tremendously high standards, he could be very funny and play the fool.’
‘I remember a smart meal one night after a performance at the Proms.
‘The waiters were a bit slow, so Colin started to flick food around the room with his fork. He was always up for a prank, never took himself too seriously, and never behaved like a celebrity.’
Steven Isserlis, the acclaimed British cellist, described Sir Colin to me as a ‘devoted family man and iguana owner’ who was ‘rarely parted from his sheepskin coat’.
The final years of Sir Colin’s life were nonetheless touched by sadness after the death of Shamsi in 2010.
A newspaper journalist who visited his home in Highbury, north London — he also had a country retreat in Suffolk — found him sitting at a sofa next to a life-sized replica of a human skeleton dangling from a stand. Asked what it was doing there, he replied morbidly, ‘just a reminder’.
In September 2012, after being diagnosed with a heart condition, he was forced by doctors to stay away from a concert held at the Barbican to mark his 85th birthday.
In one of his last radio interviews, with psychiatrist Anthony Clare, he revealed that few days passed without him thinking of his own death.
‘Every piece of music is a rehearsal of one’s own life,’ he said. ‘It comes out of nothing and disappears into nothing.’ Perhaps so, but the memories of his music will endure for many years to come.