Given the opprobrium heaped on ‘arrangements’ of Handel’s Messiah – I’m thinking of Ebenezer Prout’s once popular, now dusty sounding version from 1902, or Eugene Goossens’ tub-thumping orchestrations from 1959 – it’s a hardy soul who would have a go at it today. Enter Sir Andrew Davis, a man who is happy to rush in where angels fear to tread, while bringing six decades of experience to a version that, for all its eyebrow-raising moments, is both carefully considered and rendered with a great deal of sensitivity.

Sir Andrew Davis

Sir Andrew Davis. Photo © Lucas Dawson

As we speak, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate is preparing to head down under for two performances of his lively bells-and-whistles arrangement with the MSO and Chorus at Hamer Hall.

Davis’s first encounter with Handel’s masterwork was in church choir. “My local was St Mary’s Church, Watford and I was solo treble,” he reveals over a relaxed and genial Zoom chat from the Azores where he’s in the middle of a well-earned break. “It sounds very grand, but I did actually sing I Know that my Redeemer Liveth, once.”

For all that he considers Messiah...