After studies with his aunt Ila Rea and later with Silvio Scionti, Ivan Davis was awarded a scholarship at North Texas State College. He then received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1955 to study at Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia with Carlo Zecchi, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. Following this he took private tuition from Vladimir Horowitz in New York. He entered a number of piano competitions, and whilst in Italy won second prize at the Busoni International Competition. Further awards were received at Vercelli, Lisbon, and from the Casella Competition in Naples in April 1958. His New York debut was given at the Town Hall in October 1959, the Herald Tribune commenting, ‘Few experts in the “grand” manner can match Mr Davis’ deftest accomplishments. We definitely need artists of his kind.’ In the spring of 1960 Davis won the first Franz Liszt Competition in New York where the jury included such luminaries as Dimitri Mitropoulos and Egon Petri. The city of New York has also bestowed on him one of its highest musical accolades, the Handel Medallion.

Davis has appeared with all the major orchestras and taken part in many festivals including the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds. He has toured North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and has worked with Eugene Ormandy and Lorin Maazel. Leonard Bernstein chose him as soloist for the opening concert of the New York Philharmonic’s 1965 season, and in the same year he was appointed artist in residence at Miami University. In 1968 he made his first appearance in London at a sensational Queen Elizabeth Hall recital leading to concerto performances with the London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Davis has specialised in nineteenth century Romantic music. ‘The downward path started with Schnabel… pianists suddenly started getting obsessed with the intellectual side.’ Davis felt that pianists without Schnabel’s personality and inner warmth simply copied his mannerisms, resulting in sterile performances.

Davis’s debut LP was made for American Columbia at the time of his Liszt Competition win. It is an impressive Liszt recital, displaying an individuality of character interspersed with traits of Horowitz and the pianists of the early twentieth century. A disc for Decca, made at the time of his London debut, is entitled The Art of the Piano Virtuoso and consists of virtuoso pieces, each dedicated to a composer-pianist of the nineteenth century. As well as an impressive Caprice Espagnol by Moszkowski which Davis makes his own, banishing thoughts of performances by Josef Hofmann and Wilhelm Backhaus, there is a structured performance of Lesghinka by Liapunov. Davis is always aware of controlling the sound he produces: as one critic noted, ‘Mr Davis’ fortissimos are tremendous without ever being noisy, his cantabile evokes that rare pianistic trick of making sustained tones sound like crescendos, and his palette of tone colour is orchestral.’ In 1972 Davis recorded exciting accounts of Liszt’s two piano concertos with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Downes in Decca’s Phase Four Concert Series, as well as a fine version of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 23 with the same orchestra and Henry Lewis.

In the late 1980s Davis recorded for Audiofon. There is a disc of Grieg and another contains an interesting recital of works by Czerny, Schumann and Liszt. Perhaps Davis’s most enjoyable disc is an excellent collection of piano works by American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk that he made in London for Decca in 1975. Davis has the technique and the understanding of the idiom to make this music completely successful. Apart from one track on a compilation compact disc, neither this nor any of his other solo LPs has been reissued to date.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).