This is taken from The Times:

Sir John Drummond
November 25, 1934 - September 6, 2006
Passionate and uncompromising champion of the arts who successfully ran the Ediburgh Festival, Radio 3 and the Proms

IN 1958 John Drummond applied for the job of assistant to the director of the Edinburgh Festival, Robert Ponsonby. He made a good impression and was offered the job on the spot. But there was a snag: the annual salary was a non-incremental £600. So, sensibly (as it turned out), he soon afterwards joined the BBC, as a trainee, at £625 with increments. He was to return to the festival, as its director, 20 years later, having meanwhile made his mark not only as a gifted director of  TV arts programmes, but as a man obsessed by the arts in general and dance in particular.

To everything he did he brought a highly personal stamp, which derived as much from his conviction that none of the arts should be self-contained as from his passionate concern with quality. In a book that made him laugh, Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s A Bullet in the Ballet, an elderly dancer, once himself a noted Petrushka, shoots dead three younger interpreters of the role on the sole ground that they dance it badly. Mutatis mutandis, Drummond would cheerfully have slaughtered a considerable number of his colleagues — and not only the younger ones — who fell short of his own high standards or who failed to understand the transcendent importance of the arts.

Born in London in 1934 to a Scottish sea captain and an Australian singer (mainly of lieder), John Richard Gray Drummond grew up with parents of contradictory temperaments. His father was tone-deaf and often away at sea. Drummond, an only child, was much closer to his mother, who made him a happy home in Bournemouth, where the family moved in 1939 and where in due course the young Drummond haunted the local music library and the concerts of the municipal symphony orchestra.

After schooling, latterly at Canford, where he distinguished himself as an all- rounder, he embarked upon National Service with a major scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, already in his pocket. Poor eyesight kept him from active service and he took a course in Russian, qualifying as an interpreter. This skill turned out to be a valuable asset.

At Cambridge he at first thought he might become a history don but, like those of his contemporaries who became actors, musicians and impresarios, he was seduced by theatre and found himself involved in undergraduate productions, in cabaret and revue. He discovered that he had a talent for performance, he could make people laugh and had a sponge-like memory. Though never a Cambridge “star” like Derek Jacobi or Jonathan Miller he had glimpsed his métier, which seemed to lie in the communication of his passion for the serious arts.

The 18 years that Drummond spent in the BBC heralded an unprecedented (and, alas, unrepeated) burgeoning of arts programmes on BBC Television. But he had first to go through some radio hoops, among them an unwelcome assignment to religious broadcasting. Within a year, though, he had a foothold in television and within two he was directing his first programmes, albeit for schools.

Not for the last time, however, he got up the noses of his bosses by speaking his mind with blistering candour, and his future at the BBC was in serious doubt until he was called on to act as an interpreter for Richard Dimbleby and David Attenborough in Moscow. Later, in the Paris office, he met, among others, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier, and he heard Pierre Boulez. He was happy in Paris, but his annual report noted that “he does not suffer fools gladly”. He claimed to have taken this as a compliment, and it has to be said that there were some fools he did not suffer at all.

He returned to London on the eve of the launch, early in 1964, of BBC2. Encouraged by Humphrey Burton — but not by the more senior Huw Wheldon — he made programmes around masterclasses with Tortelier, the Leeds Piano Competition and, most memorably, about Diaghilev. For these he interviewed such legendary figures as Karsavina and Stravinsky, interviews which were printed, among many others, in his absorbing Speaking of Diaghilev, published in 1997.

His assistant on this project was Bob Lockyer, to whom the book was in effect dedicated and to whom he referred in his autobiography as having been “central to my life for over 30 years”.

Irked by what he saw as harassment from Wheldon, who told him he lacked “the common touch”, and feeling that he may have shot his bolt at the BBC, Drummond cast around and was successful in his application for the directorship of the Edinburgh Festival. His predecessor, Peter Diamand, had tended to concentrate on the musical side of the programme and upon a somewhat repetitive roster of very eminent artists. Drummond saw his chance both to vary this formula and to bring into play his interest in the inter-relation of the arts.

This interest manifested itself most clearly in his first (1979) and last (1983) festivals, the linking themes being “Diaghilev” and “Vienna 1900”, respectively. In 1979 Diaghilev’s influence was apparent in opera, ballet, concerts, lectures and an exhibition. “Vienna 1900” proved even more pervasive, performances of music by Schönberg, Berg, Webern and Zemlinsky being complemented by manifestations of Kokoschka and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, of Rilke, Hoffmansthal and Werfel. This festival was Drummond’s most successful demonstration of cross-fertilisation in the arts and he was rightly proud of it.

In other respects his record at Edinburgh was uneven: there were superb discoveries such as the Rustaveli Company and the Opera Theatre of St Louis, but there were also some serious disappointments. Nobody could say, though, that things were dull. The lowering of four near-naked Japanese actors, upside-down, from the roof of the Lothian Regional Council’s offices was the apogee of various street activities; a rapprochement with the Fringe; fireworks from the Castle battlements to accompany Handel’s music in Prince’s Street gardens; the Big Tent (for dance) in the Meadows: all these demonstrated Drummond’s concern to involve the man in the street and to placate that element among the city fathers who, ignoring that the festival brought millions of pounds into the city, begrudged the niggardly contribution they made to its finances.

It was upon this rock — and the lamentable neglect of the King’s and Lyceum theatres, the Usher Hall and its organ — that his relationship with his employers foundered. Invited to extend his contract he decided — at a very late stage — not to do so; his departure was in effect a resignation.

Between 1983 and 1985 Drummond recharged his batteries, worked on his Diaghilev book, travelled restlessly, stayed with Hans Werner Henze in Italy and Elisabeth Frink in Dorset, founded and chaired the National Dance Co-ordinating Committee and flirted with the Adelaide Festival, whose 1988 season he was invited to direct. But in 1984, he had a call from Alasdair Milne, Director-General of the BBC, which led, first, to his appointment as Controller, Music, and then to the controllership of Radio 3, the former post being sensibly subsumed in the latter. Both brought with them the bonus of planning the Proms, which Drummond addressed with relish.

His annual press conference generally produced some quotably controversial comment, among them — apropos the artists appearing that year: “You can see I am using a prepared script. If I have left anyone out, it was deliberate.” But during his Proms reign few important musicians were left out, the programmes were imaginative and audiences steadily increased. Indeed, the Proms had never had so high a profile. This was helped by the happy coincidence of the series’ 100th birthday, which Drummond ingeniously exploited in 1994 (“the first 100 years”) and 1995 (“the centenary season”) .

In the latter year (his last) he commissioned from Harrison Birtwistle — for of all nights the Last Night — a piece called Panic, for saxophone and orchestra. Predictably, he got into bad trouble with the Hooray Henrys (and BBC Television); the antithesis of his first season, when his announcement of “Dance” as the linking theme got him into trouble with the purists.

The BBC’s symphony orchestras — notoriously described by John Birt in answer to a question from Drummond as “a variable resource centre whose viability depends upon the business plan of the Controller of Radio 3” — were another of his responsibilities and with them, despite such admirable appointments as Andrew Davis to the BBCSO, he was not so happy: he thought the musicians truculent, while they reckoned he addressed them de haut en bas. The orchestras’ usefulness was nevertheless central and Drummond pioneered the negotiation of a new contract which was advantageous both to the musicians and to the BBC.

As to the network and its tone of voice, Drummond believed in providing more stimulating information and, above all, a sense of spontaneity. As he put it: “I did not like being read at all the time.” But some of his announcers were not confident enough to improvise and some of his producers were not good broadcasters; so there were casualties.

Radio 3 nevertheless changed perceptibly, and for the better, while there were exciting experiments such as the 1990 weekend from Berlin, which offered not only opera and concerts, but features and talks. A similar weekend was broadcast the following year from Minneapolis and St Paul, and Drummond regarded these two events as peaks in his achievement for Radio 3.

Rather gangling in youth, John Drummond grew into a bulky and imposing middle age. His eye was beady, his voice orotund (he could snort, even harrumph), his delivery so torrential that there were those who believed that, like some oboists, he had mastered circular breathing. A frequent public speaker — generally extempore (and often in some charitable cause) — he had an apparently inexhaustable fund of anecdotes, some funny, all telling.

He could be scathing: he described Brian Kay, a popular presenter, as “someone who never uses one cliché when two will do and has all the unctuousness of a stage curate”. And his contempt was caustic. He reserved it for people such as Birt, and, famously, Nigel Kennedy, whose distracting sartorial self-indulgence and artificial estuary accent outraged him.

Kennedy, who had got under his skin by telling him he had “an attitude problem”, asserted that Drummond exemplified “the typical arrogance of a self-appointed guardian of the arts world”. And it is true that Drummond could be arrogant and vain and intolerant, that he could drop names like confetti at a society wedding, that he did, indeed, enjoy moving among the glitterati, that he claimed as friends some who were surprised by that description and that he was capable of taking credit for the achievement of others.

But these failings stemmed from the personality of someone formidably intelligent and well informed, who cared passionately about the arts and about artists (even the censorious Wheldon reported: “I have never met an artist who did not respect and admire him”) and who was as a result inordinately impatient: impatient to reach his artistic goals, impatient with those who irrationally resisted change, impatient with intellectual nonentities and petty bureaucrats.

No wonder he offended people. But his autobiography, Tainted by Experience (the title quoted from the sneer of a desk-bound BBC suit) is testimony to a man who had panache, the guts to take risks and who didn’t mind — who indeed enjoyed — putting supercilious noses out of joint. How grey and narrow the arts world will seem without his gadfly brilliance.

John Drummond was appointed CBE in 1990 and knighted in 1995.

Bob Lockyer survives him.

Sir John Drummond, CBE, writer, broadcaster and impresario, was born on November 25, 1934. He died on September 6, 2006, aged 71.