Nobody in the music world, I suspect, will celebrate Sir Colin Davis’s 80th birthday on Tuesday with less enthusiasm than the conductor himself. He famously detests “all that charisma stuff”, and is genuinely repulsed by the despotic behaviour traditionally associated with his profession. “Power is a beastly ingredient in our society,” he says. “I only took the job of principal conductor with the LSO on the understanding that I wouldn’t have any.”

Nor, one imagines, is he thrilled to be entering his ninth decade. Apparently at ease in his family bliss – seven children from two marriages, with his Victorian terraced house in Highbury, North London, frequently echoing to the sound of music-making – he can often be wrapped in melancholy. He once confessed to the radio psychiatrist Anthony Clare that not a day passes without him thinking about his own death. “Every piece of music is a rehearsal of one’s own life,” he says. “It comes out of nothing and disappears into nothing.”

Some composers seem to bring out the dark streak in this most private of Englishmen. “Conducting Sibelius,” he wrote, “is like looking in a mirror, seeing the pitilessness of life, yet finding the strength to go on. Sibelius was happy when he was in company, depressed when he was alone. I am the same.”

It’s an honest insight from a man who has thought hard about life and philosophy. When his first marriage collapsed in the mid-Sixties, triggering a personal and professional crisis, he read his way back to spiritual stability with the help of Hermann Hesse, Herman Broch and Nikos Kazantzakis.

To compound his angst about turning 80, Davis hates any celebration of his achievements. Yet celebrated they will surely be. In a career stretching back more than half a century he has held most of the top conducting jobs in British music: Sadler’s Wells Opera (forerunner to English National Opera); the Royal Opera; the BBC Symphony Orchestra and most recently the London Symphony Orchestra (after 12 seasons he was succeeded by Valery Gergiev this year).

He has been fêted abroad, particularly in Germany (he was the first Brit to conduct at Bayreuth) and America – where, over the decades, he has been offered (and turned down) the top jobs at the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. And many of his recordings, particularly of Sibelius, Berlioz and Tippett, will probably never be bettered.

Yet he shrugs off success. “There are various ways of looking at the career of a conductor,” he says. “One is that you have to survive one humiliation after another.”

That was true, perhaps, of his early days. A clarinettist by training, he rose swiftly as a conductor after substituting for Klemperer at a Festival Hall performance of Don Giovanni in 1959. Perhaps too swiftly. The British disease of belittling our own successes hit him hard: critics sniffed at his resolutely nonsensational interpretations; musicians gave him a hard time, partly because he was abrasive in rehearsal (“I was a very arrogant young man”) and partly because he was plain Colin Davis who used to play the clarinet.

He came very close to getting the LSO conductorship in 1965, and was devastated when the orchestra plumped instead for a fiery Hungarian, István Kertész. Then, as music director of Covent Garden, this sometimes self-doubting figure was too often compared unfavourably with Georg Solti, his flashy, domineering and ruthless predecessor.

Those, perhaps, were the “humiliations”. But for the past 30 years they have been eclipsed by hundreds of triumphs. Today, his interpretations – quests for eternal verities undertaken with old-fashioned grandeur – are revered. If, in an anorak moment, I were to list the 30 best musical nights I’ve enjoyed over the past four years, at least half a dozen would have been courtesy of Davis. Never have I heard Walton’s First Symphony sound so much a document of a world hurtling towards catastrophe as he did in an unforgettable Barbican performance. Or the diverse strands of Sibelius’s First Symphony so magisterially gathered. Or Così fan tutteinvested with such grace as he did at Covent Garden this summer.

But now I’m doing what Davis would abhor – reminiscing. Far better to acclaim this still-vital force by looking forwards, to the four LSO concerts that will celebrate his birthday (how typical that the gala on October 3 wryly includes Mozart’s Requiem!); to New York’s celebration next month; and then to the premiere next April of the oratorio commissioned to mark his birthday: James MacMillan’s St John Passion.

Best of all, perhaps, Davis will continue to inspire the young. In the late 1970s I was invited by a teacher friend to a youth orchestra’s performance of Sibelius’s Second Symphony in a dingy North London school hall. I shuddered, but she said: “I think you’ll be surprised”. I was. On the podium was Davis, honouring a promise to a friend. The performance was electrifying.

Since then I’ve frequently watched him work with students at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall, to equally mesmerising effect. Long may he continue. His sanity, humanity, passion and, above all, unswerving commitment to truth are qualities to which every young musician should aspire.

— Davis conducts the LSO at the Barbican (0845 1207590; www.lso.co.uk ) next Thurs, and then Sep 30, Oct 3, Oct 7

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