Oliver Davies, gifted concert pianist, musicologist and collector – obituary
Oliver Davies, who has died aged 81, was a brilliant concert pianist with a formidable technique; he was also a walking encyclopaedia of music history, curating the picture archives at the Royal College of Music and saving many a historical record from, as he put it, “being thrown in the skip”.
Davies, a practitioner of Alexander Technique, was a sympathetic accompanist, performing with musicians such as the flautist James Galway and the clarinettist Thea King. No score held any terrors and he could play anything at sight, no matter how fiendish.
He was especially protective of the college’s collection of composer portraits and his almost total recall of detail came in handy. Once in the late 1960s he was walking past a second-hand shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea, when he spotted in the window a dilapidated 18th-century square piano bearing an unusual monogram.
He immediately recognised it as the piano in a portrait of the composer Jan Ladislav Dussek, a contemporary of Beethoven who lived in London from 1789 until his death in 1812. On the spot, Davies bought the instrument, which had long been presumed lost, and it became one of his most treasured possessions.
In 2003 he helped to initiate the Museum of Music History, a project that documents in digital form the role of music over the centuries, including posters, pictures and concert tickets. “If Britain can have a national museum of sport, a national war museum and even a national museum of coal, why should it not have a Museum of Music History,” he declared indignantly.
Oliver Davies was born in North London on August 13 1938, one of three children of Arthur Davies, a Baptist minister and an important figure in the temperance movement, and his wife Vera (née Roberts). During the war the children and their mother were evacuated from London, leaving their father to support two congregations. By the time they returned he was suffering from tuberculosis.
Young Oliver was educated at Dame Alice Owen’s School, then in Islington. Having shown great promise on the piano he was admitted to the Royal College of Music, where he won the Tagore Gold Medal. In 1961 he gave a performance of Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques with a college chamber ensemble in which he was described by one critic as “the brilliant soloist”.
He took further piano studies with Ilona Kabos and Esther Fisher and was soon being heard regularly on the radio. One of his closest collaborators was the clarinettist Colin Bradbury, with whom he made some charming recordings, and he was a regular accompanist during William Glock’s years running Dartington Summer School.
By 1971 Davies was professor of piano at the college, where he founded the Department of Portraits and Performance History. He not only gave formal piano lessons to the students, but also happily coached others working there. Later he worked for the Royal Society of Musicians.
He continued to play and in 2012 curated a programme for Kensington Palace of music that had been written for, dedicated to, or played by residents of the palace. One of his last recordings, of forgotten gems for flute and piano with the flautist James Dutton, was released in 2018.
Davies lived in modest circumstances surrounded by a degree of chaos, though he could always lay his hand on an obscure rare edition. He never owned a television set or a motor car, his one luxury being a Bechstein piano.
Such limited resources as he did acquire were used to purchase artefacts for the Museum of Music History, although its operation was entirely in the hands of a volunteer webmaster.
According to friends, Davies remained “resolutely single all his life”. He is survived by a sister, Ursula.
Oliver Davies, born August 13 1938, died July 2 2020
