Sir John Drummond, 71, UK broadcaster, arts administrator and author
Shrike!
07-Sep-06 00:27 BST
Sir John Drummond
Broadcaster, arts administrator and author
Born: 25 November, 1934, in Australia.
Died: 6 September, 2006, in London aged 71.
JOHN Drummond's career was that of a highly motivated and erudite
impresario, going from success to success until, within the higher
reaches of the world of arts management, there was hardly anywhere
left for him to go. His role model was Diaghilev (1872-1929), the
Russian impresario who electrified Paris in the early years of the
last century, and during the Twenties with his ballets and other
spectacles, commissioning new works from Stravinsky, Poulenc, Milhaud
and other composers of the era, getting the most talked-about painters
of the day to create his decors and making stars of Nijinsky, Pavlova
and other dancers, singers, conductors and musicians. Diaghilev
obsessed Drummond as if he were his reincarnation. One of the most
memorable moments of his period as director of the Edinburgh Festival
was the lecture he gave for the 50th anniversary of his hero's death,
in 1979. His ambition was to imitate him.
The highlights of Drummond's career were Edinburgh and the BBC. He
aspired to other things, might have run one of the world's great opera
houses or become the supremo of an international artistic event, such
as a millennium celebration of all the arts, but his shortcomings
hampered him. He was admired and respected more than liked, and his
vanity appeared to many as arrogance.
He was bad at hiding his opinion of others, especially those he felt
to be his intellectual inferiors, and he kept himself socially within
a select group of like-minded arts mandarins. The tact needed to
persuade others to adopt a new idea, or to raise money from public and
private sources, was not in his armoury of weapons. Much of this
probably originated from his BBC background. Programme producers
during the Fifties and Sixties did not have to worry about money: the
BBC had it. He made others feel, including those who had to pay the
bills, that he was condescending to them.
Drummond's knowledge was very great, not only of matters related to
music and dance, his principal subjects, but also he had an enthusiasm
for architecture and history, painting and literature. He was the last
of the Edinburgh Festival's three most charismatic and adventurous
directors, but the best of his planning appealed mainly to an elite
taste, while his aloof manner made him no friends on the Festival and
Edinburgh City Council. He was chosen to succeed Peter Diamond in
1978, because by then Diamond was considered to have become too dull
and predictable, and he was followed by Frank Dunlop, a non-elitist
iconoclast, his near-opposite in character, chosen just because he was
so unlike Drummond, who tried to return the Festival to a more
populist level.
Drummond was the son of a British army captain and an Australian
mother. He was educated at Canford School and Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he took an MA in history. He did two years' National
Service in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and joined the BBC in
1958, working on both radio and TV programmes, where he rose to be
assistant head of music and arts under Humphrey Burton.
He then produced many of the most successful programmes about music
and musicians of the Sixties and Seventies, which included filming
Tortelier's cello master-classes, the Leeds Piano Competition and
programmes about the lives and careers of Diaghilev, Kathleen Ferrier
and many others.
He then became the sixth director of the Edinburgh International
Festival, the most creative after Bing and Harewood. His object was to
educate more than to entertain, and he combined erudition and
knowledge of musicians in planning Festivals that attracted new as
well as established talents, and he was not afraid of new and
difficult music. His opera programmes were weaker than Diamond's, not
in the works performed, but in casting. He did not have the
negotiating skill to mount productions in association with other
countries and with recording companies, employing glamorous casts in
high-profile productions. But the smaller opera companies he invited
included many from Germany, the Piccola Scala and the Saint Louis
Opera Company, and, from Britain, Kent Opera and Scottish Opera.
His forte in his first years lay in the orchestral and chamber
concerts, especially the latter, introducing new music and new
ensembles, and there were master-classes by Hans Hotter and Elizabeth
Schwarzkopf, lectures to accompany events, many of which he gave
himself, and a literary conference, chaired by Frank Delaney. He
tended to use old colleagues from the BBC wherever possible, and BBC
techniques in his presentations, but as he grew in the job he became
more innovative, and his last Festival was by far the most memorable,
when, rather than putting together a number of unconnected entities,
he organised most events around a single theme: Vienna 1900.
It was reminiscent of Harewood's Schönberg year in 1961. The
revolution in the arts that started in Vienna just before the turn of
the century led on to expressionism and an exciting new era where,
throughout Europe, art became central to life, often waking-up and
shocking the audiences of the day, running counter to the academism of
the immediate past. Although interrupted by the First World War, the
modern movement went on to change the way people saw life. Drummond
mounted historical and art exhibitions in tandem with the music and
drama, and gave the public a crash course about the origins of
20th-century culture. It was his finest achievement: he was becoming
Diaghilev at last. But by that time he was being frozen out by those
who had, or thought they had, been snubbed or condescended to, and
1983 saw his last Festival. In addition to music, he did much to
enliven the drama and art exhibitions, and was willing to offer a
friendly hand to the Fringe, helping, among others, the Edinburgh Book
Festival. Unlike Diamond, he was happy talking to the press; in fact
he liked to talk in general - his joint Festival session with Jonathan
Miller was described as "the two fastest tongues in the west" - but
his superior air did not go down well with many.
From Edinburgh, Drummond returned to the BBC, where he became
controller of music (1985-92) and of Radio 3 (1987-92). On his
obligatory retirement at 60, he continued to run the Proms at the
Albert Hall until 1996, causing some consternation by including a
Harrison Birtwhistle work (very modern) into the traditional last
night. Among his other activities he was vice-president of the British
Arts Festivals Association from 1986, chairman of the National Dance
Co-ordinating Committee, better known as Dance Umbrella, and was
director for a year of a European Festival, which consisted of
individual events in different countries, funded by Brussels. He was
also a governor of the Royal Ballet.
He became Sir John in 1996, having been a CBE from 1990, and he also
received honours from the Austrians, the French and others, chairing
or sitting on many committees and keeping his Australian connections,
from his mother's side of the family, alive with frequent visits and
an advisory role with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He compiled two
books, one a literary anthology about graveyards, with Joan Bakewell,
and the other, with N Thompson, about dance, and wrote a book about
Diaghilev, published in 1997.
In 2000, Drummond published his autobiography, Tainted by Experience,
the first of Edinburgh's festival directors to have committed his
memories and insights of the role to print. In it, no holds are
barred, names are named, brickbats slung, and a joyous rejection of
discretion animates it throughout.
"I do have a reputation for being bitchy," he told The Scotsman's
Gillian Glover at the time. "But I think it's quite important that
some of us say what we think. There's a lot of mealy-mouthedness around."
As a young man he learned several languages, having spent some time in
Russia (he spoke fluent Russian), Paris and Vienna before and during
his early years with the BBC.
He was a bachelor.
JOHN CALDER
--
Gotta Find My Roogalator