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Sir John Richard Gray Drummond (25 November 1934 – 6 September 2006) was a British arts administrator who spent most of his career at the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
. He was described by
Rodney Milnes
Rodney Milnes Blumer OBE (26 July 1936 – 5 December 2015) was an English music critic, musicologist, writer, translator and broadcaster, with a particular interest in opera.Rodney Milnes. ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera''. Macmillan, ...
of ''
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
'' magazine
as "one of the most formidable figures in the arts world of the UK for 40 years".
[Milnes, R. "Obituary: Sir John Drummond". ''Opera'', November 2006, pp. 1311-1312.]
Early life
Drummond was born in London, the son of a Scottish
Sea Captain
A sea captain, ship's captain, captain, master, or shipmaster, is a high-grade licensed mariner who holds ultimate command and responsibility of a merchant vessel.Aragon and Messner, 2001, p.3. The captain is responsible for the safe and efficie ...
in the
British India
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...
line and an Australian singer, principally of ''
lied
In Western classical music tradition, (, plural ; , plural , ) is a term for setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of polyphonic music. The term is used for any kind of song in contemporary German, but among English and French s ...
er''.
[ ] He spent much of his childhood in Bournemouth, being evacuated to the resort at the beginning of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, spending hours in the public library absorbing all he could on creative arts, and also attending concerts by the
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an English orchestra, founded in 1893 and originally based in Bournemouth. With a remit to serve the South and South West of England, the BSO is administratively based in the adjacent town of Poole, s ...
.
He was educated at
Canford School
Canford School is a public school (English independent day and boarding school for pupils aged 13–18). Situated in 300 acres of parkland near to the market town of Wimborne Minster in Dorset, south west England, it is one of the largest s ...
on a scholarship (becoming head boy) and, during his
National Service
National service is the system of voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939.
The l ...
in the Navy, he studied Russian on the course at Bodmin. On a major open scholarship, gained in 1953, he read History at
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...
from 1955 to 1958. At Cambridge he organised cabarets for the
Footlights
Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, commonly referred to simply as the Footlights, is an amateur theatrical club in Cambridge, England, founded in 1883 and run by the students of Cambridge University.
History
Footlights' inaugural ...
Society and in 1956 wrote a musical about Regency Brighton entitled ''The First Resort''.
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at ''The Observer'', he praised Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956), and encouraged the emerging wave of ...
queried why Cambridge was "wasting time on trash like this when they could be producing Brecht",
but it did gain a run a London's
Arts Theatre
The Arts Theatre is a theatre in Great Newport Street, in Westminster, Central London.
History
It opened on 20 April 1927 as a members-only club for the performance of unlicensed plays, thus avoiding theatre censorship by the Lord Chamberl ...
.
His contemporaries included
Derek Jacobi
Sir Derek George Jacobi (; born 22 October 1938) is an English actor. He has appeared in various stage productions of William Shakespeare such as ''Hamlet'', ''Much Ado About Nothing'', ''Macbeth'', ''Twelfth Night'', ''The Tempest'', ''King ...
,
Peter Cook
Peter Edward Cook (17 November 1937 – 9 January 1995) was an English actor, comedian, satirist, playwright and screenwriter. He was the leading figure of the British satire boom of the 1960s, and he was associated with the anti-establishme ...
,
Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn, FRSL (; born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce ''Noises Off'' and the dramas ''Copenhagen'' and ''Democracy''. His novels, such as '' Towards the End of the Mo ...
and
Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. His career spans seven decades, having performed in genres ranging from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. Regarded as a British cultural i ...
,
and he was also a member of the
Marlowe Society
The Marlowe Society is a Cambridge University theatre club for Cambridge students. It is dedicated to achieving a high standard of student drama at Cambridge. The society celebrated its centenary over three years (2007–2009) and in 2008 there wa ...
, performing in
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (; baptised 26 February 156430 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the ...
's ''
Edward II
Edward II (25 April 1284 – 21 September 1327), also called Edward of Caernarfon, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. The fourth son of Edward I, Edward became the heir apparent to t ...
'', which was broadcast on the
Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio station produced and broadcast from 1946 until 1967, when it was replaced by Radio 3. It first went on the air on 29 September 1946 and quickly became one of the leading cultural and intellectual f ...
in 1958 with Jacobi in the title role.
Career
In 1958, he gained a BBC general traineeship, and his early career at the BBC was as a foreign correspondent (Drummond spoke fluent French and Russian). In 1961, he went with
Richard Dimbleby
Frederick Richard Dimbleby (25 May 1913 – 22 December 1965) was an English journalist and broadcaster, who became the BBC's first war correspondent, and then its leading TV news commentator.
As host of the long-running current affairs ...
,
Robin Day
Sir Robin Day (24 October 1923 – 6 August 2000) was an English political journalist and television and radio broadcaster.
Day's obituary in ''The Guardian'' by Dick Taverne stated that he was "the most outstanding television journalist of ...
and
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough (; born 8 May 1926) is an English broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural histor ...
to make a series of documentary films in the Soviet Union, selected with his Russian language skills in mind. Later that year he began a two-year assignment for news and current affairs in Paris as assistant to
Robin Scott.
In 1964, he was part of the launch team for
BBC 2
BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It covers a wide range of subject matter, with a remit "to broadcast programmes of depth and substance" in contrast to the more mainstream an ...
, and he directed/produced arts programmes for BBC Television, including ''The Golden Ring'', a documentary about
Georg Solti
Sir Georg Solti ( , ; born György Stern; 21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor, known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-servin ...
's
Decca Decca may refer to:
Music
* Decca Records or Decca Music Group, a record label
* Decca Gold, a classical music record label owned by Universal Music Group
* Decca Broadway, a musical theater record label
* Decca Studios, a recording facility in W ...
recording of the complete ''
Der Ring des Nibelungen
(''The Ring of the Nibelung''), WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas and the '' Nibe ...
'' (Ring Cycle) by Wagner, a biography of singer
Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Mary Ferrier, CBE (22 April 19128 October 1953) was an English contralto singer who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the cl ...
, programmes about Diaghilev, a series on architecture ''
Spirit of the Age'', and masterclasses by French cellist
Paul Tortelier
Paul Tortelier (21 March 1914 – 18 December 1990) was a French cellist and composer. After an outstanding student career at the Conservatoire de Paris he played in orchestras in France and the US before the Second World War. After the war he b ...
.
His interest in ballet and dance was reflected in many of the programmes he produced for the BBC, and he appeared as presenter in many of them.
Ultimately he became Assistant Head of Music and Arts at the insistence of his immediate superior,
Humphrey Burton
Humphrey is both a masculine given name and a surname. An earlier form, not attested since Medieval times, was Hunfrid.
Notable people with the name include:
People with the given name Medieval period
:''Ordered chronologically''
*Hunfrid of P ...
,
before becoming director of the
Edinburgh International Festival
The Edinburgh International Festival is an annual arts festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, spread over the final three weeks in August. Notable figures from the international world of music (especially classical music) and the performing arts are i ...
at the end of 1977. Drummond's period at the Festival was particularly successful, and
Norman Lebrecht
Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948) is a British music journalist and author who specializes in classical music. He is best known as the owner of the classical music blog, ''Slipped Disc'', where he frequently publishes articles. Unlike other ...
commended him in a tribute for his multi-disciplinary approach in a celebration of '
fin de siècle
() is a French term meaning "end of century,” a phrase which typically encompasses both the meaning of the similar English idiom "turn of the century" and also makes reference to the closing of one era and onset of another. Without context ...
' Vienna in 1983. In his ''The Guardian, Guardian'' obituary,
Humphrey Burton
Humphrey is both a masculine given name and a surname. An earlier form, not attested since Medieval times, was Hunfrid.
Notable people with the name include:
People with the given name Medieval period
:''Ordered chronologically''
*Hunfrid of P ...
listed several highlights from his tenure in Edinburgh: operas in 1980 including Peter Maxwell Davies' ''The Lighthouse (opera), The Lighthouse'', for international theatre 1979 with the Rustaveli Theatre, Rustaveli Company, Georgia, and 1980 for Bill Bryden's adaptation of the York Mystery Plays, York and Wakefield mystery plays for the Royal National Theatre, National Theatre, and starting a book fair and commissioning the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, Queen's Hall as a festival chamber music venue.
Radio 3 and later life
After leaving his post in Edinburgh in 1983, he returned to the BBC and was appointed Controller, Music (in tandem with his predecessor Robert Ponsonby for a year as Controller, Designate) in 1985 and then Controller of BBC Radio 3, Radio 3 (1987–92) when the two posts were merged. He was succeeded by Nicholas Kenyon as Controller of Radio 3, but Drummond continued to be responsible for the Proms until his last season in 1995. His programming included Panic (Birtwistle), ''Panic'' by Harrison Birtwistle which was premiered at the Last Night of the Proms.
While Controller of Radio 3, Drummond introduced the co-ordination of interval talks with the evening concert, doubled the length of the Saturday morning ''Record Review'' programme and scheduled the first Jazz concert at the Proms with Loose Tubes in 1987. He also devised 'weekends' covering all the arts in a particular city (Minneapolis, Berlin).
Humphrey Carpenter wrote that Drummond viewed Radio 3's audience as consisting of "thirty minority tastes, each of which is characterised by its intense dislike of the other twenty-nine".
[Carpenter, p. 335]
Drummond criticised Nigel Kennedy in 1991 for wearing a black cloak and 'Dracula' make-up while performing Alban Berg, Berg's Violin Concerto, and comparing Kennedy's usual punk clothing to the vulgarity of Liberace.
Kennedy had irritated him by claiming Drummond had an "attitude problem" and represented "the typical arrogance of a self-appointed guardian of the arts world".
Having chosen not to renew his contract as Radio 3 Controller for a second five-year term in 1992, he became openly critical of the John Birt, Baron Birt, Birt regime at the BBC, for its managerial and populist instincts. For Drummond, the BBC "has been an organisation which has seen itself as leading society, not following taste. If it no longer wishes to be that, I can't see any reason for its existence." At about the same time, he called Tony Blair a "professional philistine" and attacked the Blair government for destroying "the national sense of culture". At the very end of his autobiography he attacked what he saw as trends in the arts: "The lowest-common-denominator, accessibility-at-any-price, anti-intellectual laziness of so many of today's leaders [...] is a form of appeasement. Failing or refusing to differentiate between the good and the indifferent, while sheltering under a cloak of spurious democracy, is simply not good enough. It is a betrayal of all our civilization has stood for".
Other activities and honours
John Drummond was chairman of The Theatres Trust (1998–2001). He had also been on the Council of Management of the new music group, the Fires of London. In 1998 he made the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture with the title "Taking Music Seriously".
He was appointed a CBE in 1990 and knighted five years later.
When approached by the French Ambassador in London (Jean Guéguinou) to offer Drummond a Légion d'honneur, the Foreign Office refused it on the grounds that as he worked for the BBC he was a Crown servant; the year after when he had left the BBC, he was offered directly, and accepted the honour.
Bibliography
*''A Fine and Private Place: a collection of epitaphs and inscriptions'' (with Joan Bakewell), 1977, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
*''Speaking of Diaghilev'', 1997, Faber,
*''Tainted by Experience: a Life in the Arts'', 2000, Faber,
References
*Humphrey Carpenter (1996 [1997]) ''The Envy of the World: Fifty years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3'', Weidenfeld and Nicolson [Phoenix pbk, , pp. 316–36]
*Hevesi, Dennis, "John Drummond, 71, Director of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Dies", ''New York Times", 15 September 2006.
External links
"Former controller of Radio 3 dies" BBC News 7 September 2006
"Sir John Drummond dies, aged 71"''The Gramophone'', 7 September 2006
"Champion of music, cleaner of floors" by John Tusa ''The Guardian'', 8 September 2006
{{DEFAULTSORT:Drummond, John
1934 births
2006 deaths
People associated with the BBC Proms
BBC Radio 3 controllers
British arts administrators
British radio executives
British television producers
BBC television presenters
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
Knights Bachelor
People educated at Canford School
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge