“T’other Davis” was Michael Tippett’s nickname for him, which is to say Sir Andrew, and not Sir Colin. The latter is still much associated with Tippett’s music, and rightly so, for it was Colin Davis who, in the 1960s, reintroduced the public to early pieces by Tippett that it had seemed might be lost forever: the first two symphonies, the Double Concerto for String Orchestra, and most of all the first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, which was revived and recorded by the Royal Opera House under Colin’s passionate baton.

But it may yet prove to be Andrew Davis who did the most for Michael Tippett. Certainly he performed a wider range of Tippett’s music than anyone else: by his count he had conducted twenty-five individual pieces, and played (as pianist or organist) another six, which for a composer whose catalogue has only seventy-five entries is a great deal. Colin Davis’s passion for Tippett, man and music, should not be in doubt, and I would rather stick to the loving letters the two men wrote to one another than to the rather sour account of the relationship that an ailing Sir Colin gave to a 2012 BBC documentary. But it is true that Colin found the more extrovert sides of Tippett’s personality – the colourful clothes and camp humour – hard to deal with, and the later pieces, even those he premiered (from the breathing effect in the fourth symphony to the animal chatter in The Mask of Time and the use of blues in the third symphony and The Knot Garden) did not excite him compared to the lyrical dazzle of Tippett’s earlier compositions.

By contrast Andrew (and I must stick to the intimacy of the first name partly to distinguish him from his near-namesake) had a good dose of camp humour himself, spent a lot of his time giggling, and shared with Tippett a slight refusal to be drawn into serious talk about music rather than merely joking about it. His ability to conduct – by which I mean give a clear beat to – seemingly anything, from Messiah to Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, helped a great deal. Nothing Tippett put on the page frightened him, and the range of his repertoire mirrored the range of Tippett’s own borrowings and allusions. Andrew was a quintessentially “British” conductor in many ways, with his love of the British choral tradition and his Last-Night-of-the-Proms parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan. He led blazing performances and recordings of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, of Malcolm Arnold and Arthur Bliss. But these sat alongside, and were surely complemented by, his passion for Messiaen and Lutosławski, his commitment to Boulez and to late, serialist, Stravinsky (“bloody marvellous”), and his devotion to new music that led him to premiere music by Birtwistle and by Elliott Carter.

In this musical diversity may reside his lovingly careful response to Tippett’s impractically notated music, which always melded a national inheritance with a deep interest in European and American modernism. Most of all he and I were united in our sense that, contrary to much critical opinion, Tippett’s later music was among the most exciting. He was unwavering in his conviction that the fourth symphony was the masterpiece that should endure above all. Its last outing under his baton was given to a Proms audience of about sixty during a heatwave that was melting tarmac, and at the end he waved the bright-yellow Schott score above his head and then, with a look of sheer joy etched on a face that was already thinned by grief and illness, kissed it fondly.

My abiding memory of Andrew is of his eating a muffin (the American-style cake, bulging over a paper holder). He had generously found time – and it turned into an hours-long conversation – to talk to me via Skype, in those pre-Zoom days. I was nearing the end of my biography of Tippett and had been desperate to speak with him before handing in the manuscript. Much of the recording is given over to the unwrapping and consuming of the muffin, and much of his praise for Tippett comes through audible showers of crumbs.

I had not realised that his passion – and it really was a passion, for I can think of no other twentieth-century composer with whom Andrew was more associated or more in love – had begun as a fifteen-year-old when, in the Mahatma Gandhi Hall, he played the not-easy piano part in Crown of the Year, a rare but exquisite cantata that Tippett wrote for a girls’ school around the time of the Coronation. To know Crown of the Year in any detail bespeaks real Tippettophilia; Andrew not only knew every note but rated it among Tippett’s crowning achievements. He thought nothing of playing, as a student, the piano accompaniment to the cantata Boyhood’s End, whose difficulties gave even Benjamin Britten pause, and he won third prize in a National Piano Competition by learning the astonishingly difficult finale to the exuberant dance of Piano Sonata No 1 before, for his Mus. Bac. recital, mastering the entirely different, and kaleidoscopic, complexities of Piano Sonata No 2. He was even proud of having performed Tippett’s forgotten miniature for organ, Preludio al Vespro di Monteverdi.

How did he first become immersed in Tippett’s orchestral music? Partly it had been to do with proofreading scores; he worked on the orchestral parts of The Knot Garden and Songs for Dov, Tippett’s third, blues-torn, opera and its offshoot. But it had started even earlier, in 1963. “A friend of mine in the BBC Symphony Orchestra said ‘Oh, my sister says they’re going to be doing this studio recording of this Tippett opera’ – so I went.” It was a Third Programme broadcast of The Midsummer Marriage, conducted by Norman Del Mar and featuring Janet Baker. “That was truly an epiphany for me, and I’ve always thought it was one of the most extraordinary things he ever wrote. I do love that piece to a quite extraordinary extent, I think it’s an amazing achievement. And it has more beautiful music in it than any other piece I know, really, it’s just endless. There used to be these red leather couches in Maida Vale Studios right underneath the balcony. I was sitting there and hearing Janet.” He even admired the much-derided libretto (Tippett’s own), and could quote it in reams. “If that isn’t great poetry I don’t know what is!”

Few nowadays need convincing of the musical glory of The Midsummer Marriage, but Andrew was a passionate advocate of the thornier, more fragmented and war-torn, works that followed. “Before I slough off this mortal coil”, he said, “I want to do the Concerto for Orchestra” (he did, in Edinburgh, in 2023) “and The Vision of Saint Augustine” (a large choral piece, for baritone soloist and orchestra, mainly in Latin, and depicting two of Saint Augustine’s visions in ecstatic outpourings of notes). Augustine was not to be, nor a planned 2025 revival of The Mask of Time, Tippett’s massive cantata about, well, everything, of which Andrew led the British premiere.

“Without a shadow of doubt the most difficult piece for chorus anyone has ever written. No question. I always sent messages saying ‘make sure you allow yourself plenty of time to prepare this’. I did it in Toronto, which went quite well, I have to say. I did one of those interviews with the composer on stage. Would he talk about the bloody piece? No he would not. He kept going off on one of those wonderful Tippett-ian tangents. As always what he said he was absolutely fascinating, but very little to do with the matter in hand. Do I admire The Mask? Absolutely. It is a monster. Some absolutely fantastic music. I did it in Pittsburgh, and I said to the chorus master, ‘you have to start working on this eighteen months before, I’m not kidding’. Well he didn’t. And we did two performances and both nights I would put a downbeat down and just hope something would come out. It was that bad.” Giggles, crumbs, giggles, and then a great deal of animal noise, as he sang bits of the score.

I asked whether, like Colin, Andrew had ever found Tippett or the music irritating or maddening. He admitted to not having liked a late setting of Yeats’s Byzantium, nor Tippett’s final opera, New Year, more for the sharply remembered difficulties of its premiere than for the music itself. He was not, perhaps, the conductor to warm to its sections of reggae and electronics. “Nothing he could do would irritate me. We did have an argument once. He was talking about the Pueblo Indians, and I can’t remember what I said, but he all of a sudden said ‘you just don’t know what you’re talking about’!”

But Andrew’s affection for the man, as well as the music, came through clearly, and suddenly he was sobbing. He organised the Tippett festival in Stockholm at which the by-then nonagenarian composer caught fatal pneumonia. “Michael was in the hospital, and I went to see him. It was deeply upsetting because it was like Michael wasn’t there any more, it was like a sort of generic old man lying on the bed. There was nothing in the eyes any more. I can’t tell you how distressing that was.” That evening Andrew was in the audience for a performance of A Child of Our Time, sat next to David Wordsworth, who worked at Tippett’s publisher. “David and I were both sitting there clutching each other and weeping uncontrollably. Because there he was, in this hospital bed, just down the road.”

As ever, there was humour through the tears, or because of them. I showed him an article disdaining Tippett by a major music journalist (author, now, of one of Andrew’s obituaries). What would he, Andrew, say in response? “I’d kick the gentleman in question in the balls! WHY isn’t there a Tippett Society? Excuse me, Bax?! And, excuse me, Bliss?! I’ve been recording both lately, but, you know, Tippett needs to have some people rooting for him. He is right up there with Britten and Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Those, I would say, for me, that’s it, are the four great British twentieth-century composers. Delius? OK. And I’m a Delius fan. But I put Tippett WAY above Delius for instance. Don’t tell the Delius Society. I’ve got a T-shirt that somebody gave me: it’s this quote from Michael about what music should be, and it’s so perfectly Michael – and the way his music unlocks the door into realms that we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to go into. Heaven and hell. I will always believe that.”

I asked Andrew, as I asked him again, over guinea-fowl at a post-concert dinner, where he rated Tippett in the pantheon? The answer came at length, via Noël Coward, Howells, Messiaen, Birtwistle, Vaughan Williams and Britten, the Beethoven violin concerto and the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms (which he had conducted that evening). He was having blood transfusions, flying long-haul, smoking occasionally. As the restaurant emptied and it neared midnight, he showed no sign of tiring, for perhaps it was the music that had provided the really efficacious transfusion. “I would put Tippett up there with the greatest twentieth-century composers, on an international level, that’s the simple answer to your question.” We hugged outside the restaurant in the pouring rain, and said we’d see each other when he did Tippett’s Ritual Dances in April 2024. He sent me an email about The Vision of Saint Augustine: “I want to do this again very much!” And the Ritual Dances concert was cancelled, and he died a few days afterwards, and so much music will die with him, and he should have lived forever.