John Drummond

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

Mike Costaway this week is a broadcaster and man of the arts. His father was a sailor, his mother a singer, and he, their only child, enjoyed a happy and highly creative upbringing. He went to Cambridge, where he got a first, joined the BBC as a general trainee, and went on to make many successful arts programmes. At the age of 44, he was made director of the Edinburgh Festival. Six years later, he was back at the BBC, first as controller of music, then as controller of Radio 3. For the past two years, he's directed the Promenade concerts, whose hundredth anniversary falls this year. Passionate about the arts, he remains protective of them. Music, he says, shouldn't simply be heard, but listened to. He is John Drummond. So the whole concept of background music is anathema to you, is it, John?

John Drummond1:15

No, I understand it. I mean, all of us love music, and some people like music as a background to their lives, but it's not the only place for music. And I worry very much about an idea that somehow or other that uh music can exist as wallpaper. The French have a wonderful phrase for it. They call it music d'ammeblement, furnishing music.

John Drummond1:32

And it's as if somehow your dinner table needs, you know, wallpaper of Marlowe or something. And I don't know. That's fine in its place. I don't mind that. But what I want is that when people take music seriously, they take it seriously.

Presenter1:43

So you're saying that it's all right if we sit at home and put on a you know Rachmaninoff's rhapsody on a theme of Paganini and let it wash over us good stuff. But when we come to concerts and particularly ones that you organise, we've got to work a bit harder.

John Drummond1:56

Well, I think people ought to be prepared to take seriously, do a bit of preparation, you know, think about what they're going to. The idea that the only way into the arts is instant gratification, and if you don't please it doesn't please you immediately, you blame the artist, which is very much the line taken by so many people these days. If they don't understand something, they reject it totally and say the painter's wrong, the sculptor's wrong, the architect's wrong, the composer's wrong. I was brought up in a tradition where if you didn't understand something, you did a bit of work.

Presenter2:23

But this argument implies that there's a wrong way of listening. I mean, no, it's not.

John Drummond2:26

No, it's not it's not that. It's it it it's not at all. There there is a way of hearing without listening.

John Drummond2:31

Which is very fashionable in our time. But when I ran Radio Three, the point about Radio Three is that it does demand to be listened to. I know perfectly well that 830 in the morning you aren't sitting between the perfectly balanced speakers thinking about Stockhausen. But I do believe that somewhere in the spectrum of British broadcasting there has to be a network which takes the idea of listening seriously as a serious occupation, just as you take reading a book as a serious occupation.

Presenter2:52

And you'd disapprove of anything that might bear the tag easy listening.

John Drummond2:56

I don't disapprove of anything, I mean except except intellectual laziness. I disapprove of people who said easy listening is all you can expect from people, particularly all you can expect from the young.

Presenter2:58

Super chief.

John Drummond3:05

Because there's this terrifying feeling around now that you can't expect young people to actually work at things, that they have to be gratified the whole time by being given things in their terms, that Mahler has to be reinterpreted in terms of eighteen year olds. You know, when I was young I didn't like Mahler at all, I couldn't listen to Brooklyn's symphonies, I couldn't listen to Wagner operas, they seemed too immense and too difficult. But one worked away at it slowly, one listened to smaller things, one expanded, one grew and one lived, and one graduated to it.

Presenter3:31

Well, now, what about your eight pieces of music? Are they are they stretching? Are they intellectually demanding for you as well as for us?

John Drummond3:37

Well, they're all things I can't hum, which is rather marvellous, because I mean, you know, the things like Schubert songs or marvellous cham chamber music of a kind is in my head all the time, and most of these things are things that create a wonderful, magical sound world, which you can't hum, and which I love to hear recreated.

John Drummond3:52

They're almost all of them twentieth century music, and not deliberately, but that's because I am. I love the music of this extraordinary century one lives in.

John Drummond3:59

And I feel so sorry for people who sort of cut themselves off from it, who sort of you know bridle and resist uh rather than saying, Just let's listen to Janacek. I'm in this extraordinary world.

Presenter4:10

And that's your first composer.

John Drummond4:11

Absolutely. The opening of the opera Cunning Little Vixen, which to me is

John Drummond4:16

I suppose the most magical evocation I know of the natural world.

Presenter5:19

The prelude to The Cunning Little Vixen by Janacek, played by the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Coffengarden, conducted by Simon Rattle.

Presenter5:27

Your attitude to music that you've described, John, is one which you've used to a large extent in in putting together the proms. You've introduced more music that that isn't familiar. You've refused to let us wallow too often or too long in the stuff that we know and love.

John Drummond5:40

It isn't really a question of wallowing, it's the fact that, you know, the music that's known and loved is very, very available now. I mean, any popular symphony there are thirty or forty recordings of it in the shops.

John Drummond5:50

Things are played regularly in concert halls and on the radio.

Presenter5:53

But isn't it high risk not to have it there?

John Drummond5:55

Well, we have a proportion of it there, one would never reject that.

Presenter5:57

But you've reduced the proportion.

John Drummond5:59

I don't know that that's entirely true. I mean this year we're doing all nine Beethoven symphonies in the Proms, for instance, you know, because it seems appropriate to do that, and because I know perfectly well also that Beethoven is a wonderful draw and always sells. But I don't feel the obligation to do the same popular concertos every year. And curiously, over the nine years I've run the Proms, nobody's complained about that.

Presenter6:18

But the musical material as a whole in the proms is more substantial these days than it was a hundred years ago.

John Drummond6:22

Absolutely. It started very much as Friday Night is Music Night, bits and pieces, movements from symphonies or concertos and popular songs and arias. But even by the early years of the century, Henry Wood had made it much deeper than that. What happened with William Glock in the 50s and 60s was that music went both backwards and outwards. It went back to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages and it went out to the rest of the world. So you started getting things like Indian music in the problems, which we're doing again this year.

Presenter6:45

But there are always new pieces of the music.

John Drummond6:46

There were always new pieces. I mean, w Wood was extraordinary and the work we did, the research we did on putting this year's programme together revealed to us just how extraordinarily clever Wood was at finding what was going on in his time and getting it. But in my youth, through the Melton Sargent years, the problems had become very repetitive.

John Drummond7:02

And very English in a sense. You know, that one didn't hear a great deal of new music from abroad, was mostly from British composers, and mostly English composers actually. And you had the same works most year after year, but done by the same people. Now, it was very often very good. It was a basic A to Z of popular music, and I learned a huge amount from it. But I feel in that forty, fifty years since then, things have changed in a way that we can afford a bit more various and a bit more diverse.

Presenter7:24

But now all of those of your predecessors you mentioned, from Henry Wood through Adrian Boat, Constant Lambert, Malcolm Sargent, Sir John Barbarolly, they were all professional musicians, which you aren't. How did you how much did you feel the lack of that qualification? Did it worry you or is it now the job for a broadcaster and an impresano?

John Drummond7:33

Switch

John Drummond7:43

It's extraordinary because I never thought when I was young, you know, I thought I was going to be a historian, you know, and I never thought I was going to work professionally in music. I studied music, I was a reasonable pianist, and I studied composition, but I'm not a professional musician. I am a professional listener, though, you know, and I'm a professional member of audiences. And I've been looking at concert programmes all my life. And even as a teenager, I used to make ideal prom programmes. You know, I used to make the way other people sort of put, I don't know, Robotrain numbers together or something, I would put concert programmes together because it fascinated me. And I had a pretty big knowledge of music because I was served wonderfully by a marvellous music library in the town in which I grew up. I invented a wife and two children for myself at the age of 11 so as to get eight tickets and borrowed scores all the time and became a sort of bad pianist splasher, you know, recycle reading too much, but I got to know the music. No, I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm not a professional in the sense that many of my colleagues are, but I do find working with professional musicians an enormous sympathy and understanding for someone like myself. Who perhaps sees how the audience sees things as well when we're making programmes.

Presenter8:45

Yeah.

John Drummond8:45

Yeah.

Presenter8:45

Record number two.

John Drummond8:46

Well, I wanted to be a pianist for some part of my life, and the kind of experience which prevented me and which made me realize it was pointless, was listening to someone like Vladimir Horowitz. And there's one particular recording of Horowitz of the third concerto of Rachmaninoff. There's a moment of such startling virtuosity that even now when I listen to it I feel slightly sick and I think yes, and that's why I'm not a pianist.

Presenter10:06

Vladimir Horowitz playing part of the second movement of Ragmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fritz Reiner.

Presenter10:14

You're known, John Drummond, more than anything for your relentless energy, your enthusiasm, your natural ebullience. Now where does all that come from?

John Drummond10:23

I think it comes partly from my Australian half, you know. My mother was an outgoing extrovert person and always got on and organized things and I suppose it came partly from that.

Presenter10:32

Then she sang.

John Drummond10:32

Yes, wonderfully. Unfortunately her career was cut short by ill health, but it was a marvellous voice.

Presenter10:37

Oh

John Drummond10:37

My father was also, I must say, a pretty extrovert too. He was a great host and he was a and my youth a kind of glamorous figure, you know, the captain in uniform and all this through it.

Presenter10:37

My

Presenter10:44

He was a master marriage.

John Drummond10:45

Yes, he was a master mariner of the British India line. I saw very little of him, of course, you see, because he was away from almost all my childhood. I really hardly got to know him till he retired, you know, when I was in my teens.

Presenter10:47

Yeah.

John Drummond10:54

Uh

Presenter10:54

But he suffered from ill health as well.

John Drummond10:54

But he suffers.

Presenter10:58

But you were required, I think, to be quite a a responsible little boy. You had to do lots of things around the house because your parents went.

John Drummond11:02

I constantly had parents who were ill, you know, and I can remember at the age of nine or ten thought, you know, running round the house cooking and shopping for two uh parents ill in separate rooms.

John Drummond11:12

Um, which was um you know, it was it was part of my childhood, but it was it didn't do it any harm, you know. My my love of cooking started there.

Presenter11:18

So and it also taught you how to be organized and get things done.

John Drummond11:20

I suppose so, yes. I suppose I'm bossy, yes. You know, it all came from that time, I suppose.

Presenter11:24

Where you bossy at school as well?

John Drummond11:26

Oh, I was awful. I mean, you know, I wanted to run everything, you know, edit the school magazine, school library, and top of this, head of that, you know.

Presenter11:32

You were good at immersing.

John Drummond11:33

Um not everything, no, no. I would say I was I was not particularly good at sport. I was quite a good athlete, but I didn't enjoy running around fields chasing balls very much. Um and I was uh tiresome, you know, as I sometimes still am, you know. And uh, I had a very creative childhood. That was part of the war, you know, the fact that we didn't have lots of toys and um you know computer games and all the rest of it. We had to make our own uh pursuits. And my mother encouraged us, myself and my cousin and other young friends whom whom I spent my childhood, to sort of make a theatre and put on plays, or to to not just to learn the piano or things, but to try and write music, or to, you know, why don't you write poetry, go and paint a picture, that sort of thing, you know, and I took it as completely for granted as the way everybody spent their childhood.

Presenter11:47

But it was a creative.

Presenter12:14

So there's that, but there's but this attack and enthusiasm you bring to everything and your your your bossiness you mentioned, not I. Um i is that in part though compensating perhaps for the loss that your parents suffered? That that you know you're sort of jolly glad to be healthy and

John Drummond12:28

I suppose there is a bit of that, you know, a bit of the fact that I had to sort of feel I had to make a go of it, you know. But I didn't for a long time, you know. I mean, I was quite successful when young, the creativity dried up quite young. And I realized, you know, before I was really out of university that I wasn't a primarily creative person. I wasn't going to be a composer. I wasn't going to be a a poet, a writer, a painter, whatever it was. But I was going to want to work in that field. And I remember when I was quite young being offered a job by one of the big corporations in this country who said, you know, we'll give you a good life and enough money to indulge your artistic tastes. You can be afforded to go to Kleinborn and Salzburg and the rest of it and come and work here. And I said, no.

John Drummond13:03

I said I'd rather be poor and and and and have those things in the front of my life rather than in the background and I don't know why I felt that but I did, you know.

Presenter13:10

Code number three.

John Drummond13:11

Well, one of the other strong influences in my life has been France. I've spent a lot of time in France. I was brought up speaking French as well as English and I love France. I mean all its complexities and contradictions. But I love its emptiness and its beauty. I go there a great deal and uh the Ravel Quartet, String Quartet, seems to me to somehow to be France.

Presenter14:24

Part of the first movement of Revelle's string quartet in F played by the Quartetto Italiano.

Presenter14:30

Then John Drummond came University, Trinity, Cambridge, History, a first, uh and a tutor who told you to get out, get out. Now why did he tell you that? Did he think you weren't good enough or too good to stay?

John Drummond14:40

That was the point. He was a great man, a great historian, whom I studied with my first year and not in my second. And I met him in my third year. He went on to become Regis Professor of Medieval History. And he was an extraordinary scholar. And I met him in the street, and he said, What are you going to do when you go down? And I said, Well, I hadn't I thought I might stay on and do some research. He said, Get out, get out, get out. And I said, You mean I'm not good enough? And he said, I haven't the faintest idea whether you're good enough. I know you have an alternative, and the only people who should stay are those who have none.

Presenter15:05

Good advice?

John Drummond15:06

Oh, wonderful, yes. Twenty-five years later I met him again and told him that story, and he said, I had no right to say that to you and I said, Well, it was the best service you served me, you know.

Presenter15:11

I see what we

Presenter15:13

You got into the BBC um on one of the much cov coveted general traineeships and you were soon working on the new BBC Two under Hugh Weldon, who by your own account gave you, I quote, ten years of misery. Why didn't he like you?

John Drummond15:14

Yeah.

John Drummond15:27

It's very complicated. I don't know. I mean, I have a sort of tremendous ambivalent feeling about Hugh because I mean in many ways, I mean, his presence created the whole idea that one could have a music in an arts department rather than just occasional arts programmes as part of current affairs or whatever it is, you know. And he had his favourites. I mean, like I suppose like everybody does, and his favourites were Mumfrey Burton and Melvin Bragg and people like that, and not me.

John Drummond15:48

Um I don't know. I find myself these days sounding like him sometimes, and I owe him a lot, but I he didn't think I was any good, and he didn't think I had a future in the BBC.

Presenter15:58

And you didn't get promoted? No.

John Drummond15:59

You've also

Presenter16:00

You've also you've said since then, though, that that

Presenter16:04

There's a problem but sometimes let me it sounds slightly immodest but that if you are clever, if you're too clever people tend to pass over they don't like particularly in large corporations.

John Drummond16:22

You know, to colleagues and things like that, and people don't remember that and people don't like it, you know, and uh

Presenter16:26

You didn't suffer fool.

John Drummond16:28

No, it was a famous annual report, that one you know, when my the person writing the report said I read said said something un unpleasant about you. I read the report, which seemed to be totally laudatory, and I said, Well, where's the unpleasant sentence? He pointed and said, He doesn't suffer fools gladly. And I said, Well, isn't that a compliment? and he said, Not in the BBC.

Presenter16:45

And I mean, did you learn from that? I mean, do you suffer from the terms?

John Drummond16:47

Well, and there came a moment when there came a moment when I stopped saying what I thought and everybody said, Oh, goodness, John's grown up, John is more mature now I still thought the s thought the same things, but didn't feel the need to say them all the time. And I think it's a lesson I should perhaps relearn now. I occasionally speak out perhaps more than I ought to and people think, Oh, there he goes again.

Presenter17:03

But do you think there is, going back to the clever point, do you think there is a bias in this country against clever because we're to call somebody

John Drummond17:08

It certainly wasn't in the BBC, you see. I mean, there is a buzz in this country. I mean, the in-cloud thing, too clever by half and all the rest of it. There's certainly in this country it's sort of not not considered done to consider yourself clever. But the BBC was full of people who were in a sense intellectual show-offs and who were, you know, that's what their programmes were about. They were making wonderful programmes. And I sat there in that department in the sixties with the most amazing people there. I mean, Ken Russell and Patrick Garden and Jonathan Miller and Tony Palmer and people like that, you know, who were all show-offs in that sense, all immensely intelligent people, bursting with ideas. It was a hugely creative time.

Presenter17:41

Next piece of music.

John Drummond17:42

But one of the last big projects I undertook before I left television was a massive programme about Stravinsky's Ballet Les Noss.

John Drummond17:50

which consisted of a performance of the music and of the ballet version, which was conducted by Ellen Bernstein, who talked about it. And at the same time a recording was made of it. And I mean, I I learnt Russian when I was young and I I love the Russian language and I think it's one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century music and I've that recording has very personal special memories for me.

Speaker 418:54

No.

Speaker 419:00

Yeah, which is more than

Presenter19:05

The second tableau of Stravinsky's Le Nos with the English Bach Festival Chorus and members of the English Bach Festival Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. So that was you at the BBC really, nineteen years altogether, wasn't it? And then you quit and you took the job as director of the Edinburgh Festival. It was a terrific break. Well you must you would have been forty-four.

John Drummond19:16

That wasn't it.

John Drummond19:25

I was. Yes, that's why it made me, oddly enough, one of the older directors. I'd always sort of thought that Edinburgh was something which, with a great deal of good luck, you graduated to at the very end of your career, but in fact almost all Edinburgh Festival directors have been young.

Presenter19:36

But it was five years which really made your reputation.

John Drummond19:39

Yes, it did.

Presenter19:39

Yeah.

John Drummond19:42

It was extraordinary. It's one of the world's greatest jobs, you know. I mean, we d we dwell so much on the problems of the arts in this country, you know, and I had problems and I left Edinburgh ultimately for the same reasons as everybody else, because there was this suspicion between the funding organisations and the festival and this lack of mutual support. But while I was doing that job, I mean, it was extraordinary. You went round the world with a card saying director of the Edinburgh Festival. Every door was open to you. And you you you realize that for the world that Edinburgh meant festival.

John Drummond20:09

And for Edinburgh festival was sort of oh, do you have something we've got fund every year. This is the City Council. Well, not just the City, it was the City did what it could. The City's a small city, you know, and not a rich city. It was very much the business community's attitude, and the attitude of the sort of old Edinburgh, that somehow the festival was something which was a full of tiresome young people making fools of themselves on the streets, you know.

Presenter20:12

This is the city council.

Presenter20:28

But was it the financial frustrations that did for you in the end?

John Drummond20:30

That and the theatres, that and the fact that I I really got fed up with apologising for the state of the theatres. Frank Dunlop, my successor, I mean, wonderfully, I mean, managed to achieve almost all the things I failed to achieve. And so over the past ten years since I left Edinburgh, the King's Theatre, the Lyceum Theatre, the Travis Theatre and the Empire Theatre have all been rebuilt.

Presenter20:47

Why did he succeed where you failed?

John Drummond20:49

I think he probably had perhaps more tact and more understanding. I don't know what it was, but I mean I started, you know, stumping a place like a like a like a constituency candidate and talking to every support group and every professional association and trying to get real help and spending a lot of time in Edinburgh. And after five years I found I'd got nowhere, you know, and uh I don't think the city was mean, but I think it was lacking in vision. It didn't see that what I was doing and what my successor predecessors and successors have done has done more good for that city and community worldwide than than the Commonwealth Games, for instance, which they were much more keen on having. And it was really the fact that they were proposing to spend vast sums on the Commonwealth Games rather than the festival that was the kind of

John Drummond21:29

actual breaking point for me.

Presenter21:32

Number 5.

John Drummond21:33

Well, opera came into my life. I mean, you know, in my early years, uh my mother was a leader singer, not an opera singer, and we were a bit sniffy about not a lot of opera singing. But right from my earliest years, Mozart was part of my life, and uh I've always loved Khazy Van Turtiff.

Speaker 421:54

Praise the Lord.

Presenter22:44

The trio Suave Silvento from the first act of Mozart's Cosifantute, sung by Carol Faness, Dolores Ziegler, and Claudio Desderi, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Heitink.

Presenter22:56

It was in nineteen ninety one, John, that you attacked Nigel Kennedy for his dress and his general presentation on the concert platform. You said if he wanted to be Liberace we should give him a candelabra or go home. Why did he arouse such a violent reaction?

John Drummond23:12

The curious thing was I wasn't actually attacking cl Nigel at the time, I was attacking his record company. Um what I was talking about was the extent to which uh music was being packaged and sold.

John Drummond23:24

Uh and I was talking about record sleeves with you know girls lying embracing cellos and uh the kind of uh sort of you know slightly really inappropriate to me, vulgar packaging. And I said you know and then artists themselves can actually damage their careers by what they do. Eileen Joyce who was a wonderful pianist and part of my early life was my mother for a brief period was her guardian. She ruined her career by all this nonsense about changing her dress all the time and putting on different coloured dresses with different concertos. And I expressed the anxiety that Nigel in fact who pay more attention to how he was dressed than how he was playing better watch it because on his heels were coming a young generation of violinists who were superb also. I mean Nigel's talent is terrific but it just it just got silly you know. The thing was one saw on one hand Klaus Tenstadt seemed to be this boy has amazing talent and loved making records with him and Nigel himself as it were sort of stamping on on the on the sort of the idea of music and sort of getting his priorities it seemed to me.

Presenter24:18

But he was crossing the Great Divide, wasn't he? He was appealing to the the popular appetite. I mean, i is it wrong that people hum vivaldi in department store changing Neswandorma at the football?

John Drummond24:30

No, not in the least. I mean, for heaven's sake, I mean, this has happened before, but don't let's claim that this is the major breakthrough for classical music becoming everybody's favourite thing. What I wanted, in fact, was people to think hard about whether Nigel Kennedy's records were selling because of the way he dressed or because of the way he played. Because, frankly, in spite of this, yes, it does matter. It matters enormously. But the quality of music is not in any way compromised. And the fact of the matter is there were simply one or two performances which were not at the level I'd hoped for from a young man who had huge talent. But the recording is good.

Speaker 424:46

Yeah

Presenter25:00

But the recording hazard.

John Drummond25:02

Well, I think there are better recordings of the four seasons you see, and so it's interesting as to why certain things sell. They sell because of how they're packaged or sell because of their their their their innate qualities. And you see what happened with the Kennedy story was everybody tried to make me out as some kind of pompous old fashioned toffee-nosed person who never knew out the public. And you can't really do that with me because I've actually run some of the popular things and I get lots of audiences in. And we don't dress up in funny clothes, we don't put funny lights in.

Presenter25:23

And we don't dress people in funny clothes.

Presenter25:25

That's the great contradiction in you, isn't it? That you are a popularizer. I mean you said you tau you've run the Edinburgh Festival and you run the promise very successfully. But at the same time you're saying to us, as you to the to the music going public, you must work at it, you must work harder. What I'm saying.

John Drummond25:29

Yeah.

John Drummond25:40

Good.

John Drummond25:41

I'm saying I'm saying come up to the level of the music. We're not going to bring down the music to a level below the level that we should be taking.

Presenter25:47

Why not? Why shouldn't we seek pleasure from going to a concert? Why can't we lean back and enjoy something that we know quite well and can hum?

John Drummond25:50

You know what I'm saying?

John Drummond25:54

Well, that's perfectly right. I mean you do that all the time. It's just whether you're prepared to take anything on board you don't already know. Because, you know, it's like people with food. Uh people say they won't eat something and you find very often that they never have eaten it, they've never tried it. People come to me all the time and say,'cause I don't like new music and I say, Are you boasting or apologizing?

John Drummond26:12

And of course they're they're actually boasting. They're coming saying, Look at me, aren't I wonderful? I don't like new music. I'm perfectly willing to accept that music can be accept experienced and loved on all levels. But the greater the knowledge and understanding, the greater the reward.

Presenter26:26

Record number six.

John Drummond26:27

Well, this is an example. This is the one of the syll symphonies of Carl Nielsen. I mean, Nielsen, a composer who in this country has always been overshadowed by Sibelius. I mean, Sibelius became an instant popularity, and Nielsen never really has. And I think he's one of the great original voices of the twentieth century.

John Drummond26:40

And the fifth symphony, which I which I really love, I think above the others, has in it an extraordinary moment which is really the individual against the state. I mean, a a kettle drum takes on an orchestra and fights and fights.

John Drummond26:52

and doesn't really win, but survives.

Presenter27:53

Part of the first movement of Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. Five, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davies, one of the five orchestras supported by the BBC. What do you say to those who say this is no longer a necessary function of the corporation if if it wants to save money, which it does, it should cut down to, well, one super orchestra?

John Drummond28:14

Well, you can you can take that several ways, that argument. You can say uh it's expensive compared to what?

John Drummond28:19

The annual cost of the BBC's orchestras is about the same cost, I suppose, as two television drama serials. And what these orchestras give, for a relatively small amount of money, I mean it's less than a quarter of a percent of the BBC's budget, and what these orchestras give, in fact, is that power of musical patronage which has turned this country from the country without music, Las Landes und Musik, into one of the music capitals of the world.

Presenter28:42

But if you were setting up a BBC music department today from scratch, you would not build into it five in-house orchestras.

John Drummond28:48

Who says I wouldn't? I mean, whether I put them where they are now, or whether they'd all be symphony orchestras, or perhaps one might be a chamber orchestra, or one might have different preoccupations, I don't know. And that must be looked at, and my successors, Nick Kenyon and other people I know, are studying that at the moment. But what I resent is the idea that somehow the BBC should retreat from that position of patronage, which has given it its power as a commissioner of new music, as a creator of new audiences, and as somebody who has led to the whole working lives of a generation of people like myself. I mean, I would never have got where I got without what the BBC provided in terms of music, and I want that to be available to young people today.

Presenter29:24

Some people would advance a a similar argument against Radio three. Indeed, m Mary Goldring the Economist did so recently. Its cost is too great given the size of its audience. I mean, I think it costs something like twenty one percent of the BBC radio budget and it's got an audience of what, six percent?

John Drummond29:35

So

John Drummond29:40

Clear.

John Drummond29:41

Um, do you know how much um having foreign correspondence costs, or how much having local regional news people costs, or how much you're spending on a rolling news service, which at the present moment seems to be attracting rather a small audience? I mean, organizations make their priorities.

John Drummond29:55

I cannot believe in something claiming the licence fee as the B B C does, which is not going to take seriously that part of the audience may be small in number, but important and potent in influence.

John Drummond30:05

The teachers, the opinion makers, the people who actually want broadcasting at its highest level, and not just at its broadly popular, lowest common denominator level. Now, it is expensive to do that, but that's what the money's there for. The money is there, in fact, to make important statements of that kind, as well as hugely broad popular statements. Of course, radio budgets are much resented by television. Television, which manages to get nine production credits on a quiz programme, I mean, simply doesn't understand how little radio costs. The intimacy of the situation we're in now, with just a few of us in a room making something that lots of people listen to for relatively small costs. And when radio has resources, like its drama departments or like its orchestras, they look disproportionately expensive compared to how cheap most of the rest of radio is. But look how grossly expensive television is, even at its most trivial.

John Drummond30:54

And I don't have any problem with that equation.

Presenter30:57

Record number seven.

John Drummond30:59

I think uh of all the contentious composers of the twentieth century, the one who's meant most to me personally is Alban Baird.

John Drummond31:06

Scholbert is hard to love, even though there are great great works there, especially in the early years, and Webhunn's work is so tiny in a sense, but of the great Viennese second school people, Berg seems to me the great human being.

John Drummond31:16

And I think Vodsek is without any question the greatest opera of the twentieth century.

Presenter32:20

Part of Albenberg's Woc played by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abardo.

Presenter32:25

You give up what you've described as the best electric train set in the world, the problems next year. What are you going to do then, Tom?

John Drummond32:29

Yeah.

John Drummond32:32

I really don't know at this stage. I mean, I I just felt that um I mean very nicely the BBC asked me to stay on longer, but I felt ten years was probably enough.

Presenter32:39

But you've had Edinburgh followed by Radio Three followed by The Proms. I mean, if you stop doing all of that, you stop having a position, people stop listening to you. I mean, is that bearable when your voice has been heard?

John Drummond32:50

I'm not so concerned about being listened to in this way. I mean, what these jobs have given me have given me a public position, but I I don't need to have, as it were, a public perch. I mean, I'm in many ways a very private person.

Presenter33:01

Yeah.

John Drummond33:01

Yeah, it's a solid

John Drummond33:02

Absolutely. I mean, the fact is I spend a lot of time alone. I mean, and I need to. I mean, I talk so much that unless I'm alone, I never stop talking, and it wears me out as well as everybody else. So I'm good at silence, and I'm good at solitude, and I also it's only that way that I think. So I don't have to have a great public platform, and also I mean, being practical about it, I've had some of the very best jobs in this country. I'm 60 this year, and I don't suppose I can expect to go on having great jobs like this forever.

Presenter33:12

Yeah.

Speaker 433:12

Yeah, okay.

Presenter33:30

So there's no mileage in here yet.

John Drummond33:32

Well, I'm not ready to hang my boots up yet, you know, but I don't know that I want to necessarily take on another huge institution with all the stress of that. And that's the the dilemma the internal dilemma which I'm thinking about at the moment.

Presenter33:43

I mean somewhere that you might end up running a tea shop in Tiverton.

John Drummond33:46

I said that once, I said if all else fails, I'll go I'd run a tea shop. Yes, you're not.

Presenter33:49

But you wouldn't play music in it'cause people might stir their tea and

John Drummond33:52

I might play some kind of music with it, yes, but not Mala Symphonies, don't worry.

Presenter33:56

But in the meantime, you're present for every single prom concert that there is 68 concerns.

John Drummond34:00

I have to. I mean, you know, because after all I've I've helped them come about. I want to know what happens. I'm curious. You know, the whole essence of me is curiosity. I want to know more. I want to know about things. I want to know how they work. I want to know how they happen. So I'll be there every night.

Presenter34:13

Woe betide anyone who talks or coughs during the performance, because the wrath of Drummond will be upon them.

John Drummond34:19

Well, I mean, the coughing we all cough. I cough myself too, quite often at times. Uh but I do at least put my hand in my mouth or carry a handkerchief. It's the digital watches that are boring, and the people with with handbags on chains, and the people with six bangles on the wrist, and the people who um turn and say, Wasn't that lovely? Doesn't that remind you of our holiday and whatever it is, you know.

Presenter34:36

And the and the clinking of the glasses in the back of the box.

John Drummond34:38

Oh, that, yes, that happens on some nights, yes, yes. The corporate sponsors, you know.

Presenter34:44

Record number eight.

John Drummond34:46

Well, Harrison Burtwhistle is a contemporary of mine and has been a friend for many years and a close friend too. And I think the most extraordinary of the commissions from the BBC during my time as controller was for a piece called Earth Dancers, which he wrote for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's an extraordinary piece. It it's a great volcanic eruption. It's like watching lava roll down a mountainside. It's wonderful. And it's been played in the Promise this year, actually, by the Cleveland Orchestra, who so it's now it's travelling the world as well as being originally done by the BBC.

Presenter36:14

Part of Harrison Birtwistle's Earth Dances played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oertwisch. So if you could only take one of those records, John.

John Drummond36:23

Well, I really ought to say Earth Dancers because it's the one that would repay most by repeated listenings. But in fact, uh in this twentieth century programme I'm going to take the Mozart, Kusivantuotti, because it's the most profound psychologically, it's the one that is most human.

John Drummond36:38

It's the one that really brings one closer to people, which is what I'll miss most.

Presenter36:42

What about your book?

John Drummond36:43

Yeah.

John Drummond36:43

Well, can I can I tell you about a luxury first? Because the book becomes meaningful if you know what the luxury is. Can I do it in the wrong order? Uh because what I want is a luxury is a small theatre.

Presenter36:47

That's where it is.

John Drummond36:52

And what I'd like as my book is an encyclopedia I've got, an American encyclopedia, of the libretti of all the well-known operas.

John Drummond36:58

And then I'll have my little theatre and all the opera de bretti, and I'll spend my evenings putting on my my own ideal opera production.

Presenter37:04

Is this a model theater with lots of little model people?

John Drummond37:05

Yes, yes. Sort of large model theatre with some working lights. That's what I like.

Presenter37:10

John Drummond, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

John Drummond37:14

It's real fun.

Speaker 337:22

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.