• Genre: Soundtrack
• Active: '60s - 2000s
• Instrument: Conductor

Biography

New York-born and England-based composer/conductor Carl Davis has delivered ear-catching symphonic music for more than four decades. His dramatic scores have been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater while the pieces he composed for ballet have been utilized by the London Contemporary Theater Company, the Sadler Wells Royal Ballet, the Northern Ballet Theater, and the English National Ballet Company. A master at composing scores to accompany silent films, Davis has provided soundtracks for Napolean, Flesh and the Devil, Ben-Hur, Thief of Baghdad, Greed and Intolerance, and Phantom of the Opera. His work in television includes composing scores for Pride and Prejudice, which received a BASCA Ivor Novello Award for "best music for a television production" in 1996. His score for the film The French Lieutenant's Woman received BAFA "original film score" and Ivor Novello Awards. Davis' collaboration with Sir Paul McCartney on his symphonic piece "Liverpool Oratorio" attracted worldwide attention in 1991. He conducted the piece's premier at Anglican Church.

Born to a Jewish family, with roots in Poland and Russia, Davis began studying piano at the age of seven. He attended his first opera three years later.

After attending the New England Conservatory of Music and graduating from Bard College, Davis worked with the New York City Opera and toured with choral conductor Robert Shaw as accompanist. He relocated to England after marrying British actress Jean Boht in 1971.

Appointed artistic director and conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's summer pops season in 1993, Davis serves as vice chancellor of the University of Liverpool.

Davis was made a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French ministry of culture. ~ Craig Harris, All Music Guide

• Born: 1936 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '20s, '70s-'90s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
• Career Highlights: Topsy-Turvy, City Lights, Napoléon
• First Major Screen Credit: Intolerance (1916)

Biography

Carl Davis is an American-born composer/conductor who rose to prominence in television and films in England during in the 1970s. Born in Brooklyn, he studied at Bard College and later served as assistant conductor of the New York City Opera. In 1961, he attended the Edinburgh Festival for a performance of an award-winning theater composition of his and was subsequently engaged to write the music for the satiric, topical television revue series That Was the Week That Was. Thus began his British career, which soon branched out to conducting and composing for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theater, and the Sadler's Wells Ballet. Davis married British actress Jean Boht in 1971 and since then he has been based exclusively in England, where he has made major contributions to television and movies, in addition to composing numerous ballets and concert pieces. Davis first achieved international notice in the mid-'70s with the American television broadcast of The World at War, the Thames Television documentary series about World War II for which he composed all of the original music and conducted the orchestra. His title theme was one of the most memorable and somber pieces of scoring ever heard for a program aimed at a mass audience, while his work underscoring the series content was filled with wry, ironic humor as well as deep sadness; some of it was very Russian in style, recalling Shostakovich and Prokofiev's music. The series was rerun on American TV for more than two decades and gave Davis a platform for exposure in the U.S. that no British program could have matched (before or since).

With the ribald comedy Up the Chastity Belt, Davis had been scoring movies as early as 1971, but by the end of the '70s, he was nearing the front rank of British film composers. That status was confirmed when his music for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) won the Anthony Asquith Award (the British Academy's equivalent of the Best Original Score Oscar) and the Ivor Novello Award. He has since written music for numerous other major British films, including the Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired comedy Topsy-Turvy. His most distinctive and unusual contribution to film music, however, has been in the area of writing new scores for various silent classics, principally in association with restoration work on the films themselves done by Kevin Brownlow -- first and most notable among these being Abel Gance's Napoleon. Ironically, his music for the latter was only heard for the film's European reissue; for the American presentation, distributor Francis Ford Coppola insisted on using music written by his father, Carmine Coppola. Davis' new music for other films of the '10s and '20s included The Thief of Bagdad, Flesh and the Devil, and, more recently, the restored version of Universal's 1925 classic The Phantom of the Opera.

Several of Davis' scores for the silents were even heard in live performance in New York in conjunction with limited theatrical showings of the films with full orchestral accompaniment. His other film and television work included the music for Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and a good deal of work for CNN on its Cold War documentary series, among other productions. He also achieved some notice in popular music circles through his collaboration with Paul McCartney on the latter's "Liverpool Oratorio." Davis has a fairly substantial catalog of recordings of his own, most of them soundtrack-related for EMI and other British labels, including a superb disc of Sir William Walton's film music. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

The Great Gatsby Buy this Movie	Topsy-Turvy Buy this Movie	Goodnight Mister Tom Buy this Movie	Anne Frank Remembered Buy this Movie
Widows' Peak Buy this Movie	Liberation Buy this Movie	The Return of the Native Buy this Movie	George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin Buy this Movie

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Davis, Carl (b New York, 1936). US composer. He has written the scores for several ballets including A Simple Man (chor. Lynne, Northern Ballet Theatre, 1987), The Picture of Dorian Gray (chor. D. Deane, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, 1987), and A Christmas Carol (chor. Massimo Moricone, Northern Ballet Theatre, 1992), and arranged music by Tchaikovsky for the score of D. Deane's Alice (1995).

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