Auteur: Wendy Thompson

A consummate all-round musician, Carl Davis is widely known internationally in many spheres of music-making. Born in New York in 1936, he studied composition with Paul Nordoff and Hugo Kauder, and subsequently with Per Nørgård in Copenhagen. His early work in the USA provided valuable conducting experience with organizations such as New York City Opera and the Robert Shaw Chorale. In 1959 the revue Diversions, of which he was co-author, won an off-Broadway Emmy and subsequently travelled to the 1961 Edinburgh Festival. As a direct result of its success there, Davis was commissioned by Ned Sherrin to write music for That Was The Week That Was. Other radio and TV commissions followed and Davis’s UK career was launched. Since then he has been enormously successful in the world of theatre, film and TV, composing scores for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the much-loved themes to the award winning BBC series Pride and Prejudice and Cranford. Music for silent films has been a particularly enduring strand to Davis’s activities. His 1980 score for Abel Gance’s silent film Napoléon triggered an extraordinary revival of interest in the silent film, and Davis’s oeuvre of more than fifty scores for this medium, including Flesh and the Devil, Ben-Hur, The Thief of Bagdad, Greed, Intolerance, I’m King Kong and The Godless Girl, has brought him international acclaim. A much sought-after conductor of silent films and concerts throughout the world, in 2005 he was awarded a CBE (Hon). The “Carl Davis Collection” was formed in 2009 to record and promote his works.