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Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky
By Rick Jones Last updated at 19:20pm on 08.08.06Composer and conductor Carl Davis creates music for the likes of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Meet the maestro behind a new performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra of Prokofiev's 1938 score for the film Alexander Nevsky
"I am more reliable than a clock," says Carl Davis, the world's most famous conductor of movie-concerts, the burgeoning art form of accompanying silent films with a live orchestra. "Some people like to have the cues ticking away in their earphones, but I resist that," he adds, proudly.
Davis has been hired by Serge Dorny, the artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to keep its performance of Prokofiev's 1938 film score Alexander Nevsky in synch with Sergei Eisenstein's non-silent film when it is shown tonight at the opening concert of the LPO's Prokofiev Season at the Royal Festival Hall.
It was young Dorny's idea. The LPO's imaginative projects man knew Davis from his previous occupation as organiser of the Flanders Festival, and in fact had met his wife at a Carl Davis movie-concert. When Dorny arrived in London, Davis was one of the first people he sought out.
The conductor/composer owns a beautiful house in Barnes, where he lives in splendour with his wife of 20 years, the actress Jean Boht, star of the TV comedy Bread. Born and brought up in New York, Davis is a third generation American with Russian and Polish ancestry, but claims always to have yearned to come to Europe.
He captured a particular strain of nervous English innocence in his music for the BBC's hugely successful costume drama Pride and Prejudice last year. "In Holland, I am known not for the films, but as the Pride and Prejudice composer," he boasts.
For most people, however, Carl Davis made his name in 1980 as the musical director of the project to revive Abel Gance's magnificent but jerky 24-frames-a-second film Napoleon, one of the pinnacles of artistic achievement in the mute era, which had not been seen since its incomplete first showing in 1927, the year of the Jazz Singer.
Davis created a score consisting largely of bits of Beethoven - the Eroica Symphony and the Emperor Concerto - linked with bits by himself. It was a huge success. Jeremy Isaacs was so impressed by Napoleon that he immediately commissioned a series of silents for Channel Four, for which Davis would handle the music.
He has since written scores for Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1926), Lillian Gish in The Wind (1927), Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad (1924), Buster Keaton in The General (1926), Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923), Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Raymond Navarro in Ben Hur (1926) among many others. Dorny has already scheduled Ben Hur for spring and the Four Horsemen for "apocalypse year", 1999.
"That's what I do nowadays," says Davis. "I create silent-movie scores at the rate of two or three a year, then I go round the world performing them."
His scores are a mixture of original music and his own, although over the years his own have become predominant. As American composers go, Davis counts himself more in the Leonard Bernstein rather than the Elliott Carter mould.
"My music ranges from serious and intense to Broadwayish jazzy. I had a noisy period when I wrote the score for The Wind, but I take the dissonant route only when necessary. I have always been involved in visual things. Theatre, film and dance turn me on."
Davis's great claim is that he introduced the concept of the Pops Orchestra to Britain. "I like to think in terms of the concert as show. The programmes have lots of film music, of course, but you have to remember that film music also includes Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony even if it does go down in the programme as Theme from Babe."
The theme from Alexander Nevsky which Prokofiev himself rewrote as Cantata Op 78 is one of his greatest works, written at a time of passionate commitment to the state by young idealists such as himself.
A full-blooded choir sings how Nevsky's troops will smash the Swedes' ships to kindling and wishes death on all the enemies of Mother Russia, while a mezzo-soprano soloist calls young, fit industrial operatives to war for the glory of the state.
The film's soundtrack is recorded on three strips: dialogue, effects and music, which in this instance is removed and replaced by the live LPO. Subtitles flow like sports results. At one point Carl Davis must time the entry of the orchestra so that the mezzo Elena Zaremba is able to lip-synch a Bolshevik.
This is nothing to the conductor who is more reliable than a clock. "I may not be the first conductor you would think of for the Cantata, but I am the only one you would think of for the film."
