In his 30s, Sir John Drummond, who has died aged 71, directed and produced many fine programmes for BBC television on musical and architectural subjects. However, he left a greater mark as an enabler, in charge of two of Britain's most important cultural institutions, the Edinburgh International Festival, from 1979 to 1983, and Radio 3, where, from 1985 to 1995, he also planned the annual seasons of Promenade concerts.
In 2000 Drummond published his autobiography under the self-mocking title Tainted By Experience - which was how he had been described by a henchperson (his word) of the BBC's notoriously politically correct director general, John Birt. The apparatchik had added disparagingly that despite his alleged experience, Drummond had not achieved very much. In fact, he spoke up courageously for what he believed in, even when his comments made uncomfortable listening and cost him friends. His withering assessments of such cultural icons as his erstwhile colleague Melvyn Bragg and the violinist Nigel Kennedy were eagerly anticipated at his press conferences, at least by those who were not the butt of his biting sarcasm.
Drummond was born in London. His love of music came from his mother, Esther, an Australian-born student of singing, to whom he was devoted. As a boy, he saw little of his father, Archibald, a captain of ocean liners, who was tone deaf and had no feeling for music.
Evacuated to Bournemouth at the outbreak of war, Drummond went to hear the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and a recital by Kathleen Ferrier, whose biography he was to film 20 years later in what was probably his most successful television production. Meanwhile, his mother imbued him with her passions for poetry and painting, her accompanist gave him piano lessons and a friendly local librarian allowed him to borrow as much music as he wanted. (He described his piano playing as "splashy and erratic", but he always enjoyed playing for his own pleasure.)
In 1948 he won a scholarship to Canford school, at Wimborne, Dorset. A studious, intellectually inclined teenager, he was a devoted fan of the recently inaugurated Third Programme. He left school as head boy with a major scholarship to read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. The intervening years (1953-55), spent compulsorily in the Royal Navy, led to him learning Russian, an invaluable asset in his later career. He described himself as "an unattractive, bespectacled six-footer" but his Cambridge peers recall a brilliant conversationalist and witty female impersonator, whose cabaret turns for the Footlights were matched by enough histrionic ambition to see him play Baldock to Derek Jacobi's Edward II.
In 1958 Drummond was picked out as a general trainee on the BBC's fast-track recruitment scheme. After being shunted between religion (in Scotland, his father's homeland), fledgling drama documentaries and low-budget schools programmes, he was offered the number two position in the Paris office. Though programme-making was judged not to be his forte, he was soon in Moscow, translating for a high-powered BBC delegation, and over the next two years he impressed most of the top brass - save only the arts supremo Huw Wheldon (obituary, March 15 1986), who, to Drummond's chagrin, passed over his application to join the arts magazine programme, Monitor, in favour of Patrick Garland and Melvyn Bragg.
However, when Wheldon's department expanded to prepare for the launch of BBC2, Drummond's claim for a production place could not be ignored, and by March 1965, when the music and arts department came into existence under my direction, he was already a veteran. Among his music credits over the next few years were the award-winning documentary about Georg Solti's recording of Wagner's Ring cycle, The Golden Ring, for which he directed most of the film sequences; A Question of Stature, a BBC1 feature about Chopin; the master classes given by French cellist Paul Tortelier; and a behind-the-scenes film about the 1966 Leeds international piano competition, for which he won the best director award at the Prague TV festival.
When, in 1967, I left the BBC for London Weekend Television, Drummond should have been considered as my successor, but Wheldon, by now controller of programmes, was not impressed by his restless and highly strung personality. Wheldon hived off music programmes from the other arts and created two departments. Arts features went to Stephen Hearst, the Viennese-born film-maker and a man nearly 20 years older than Drummond. Music, including ballet and opera, was to be the remit of former recording producer John Culshaw.
This proved an unhappy period for Drummond, though he did turn in a fascinating documentary about Diaghilev. But he made his mark with a magazine series entitled Music Now, dedicated to the contemporary scene and featuring such composers as Peter Maxwell Davies, Nicholas Maw and John Tavener.
In 1969, Drummond accepted Hearst's invitation to become executive producer of arts features. Entrusted with the simultaneous development of six or seven projects, he was in his element, yet frustrated because he did not have the power to order individual producers as to which programmes should be undertaken. No sufferer of fools, he also found it difficult to put up with what he felt to be the arrogance of some colleagues. In the corridors of Kensington House, Shepherd's Bush, his critiques were legendary. "Saw your programme last night," he would say. "So good to see you back on form at last." Or, "Saw your programme last night; I've been defending it all morning." But in 1975 he achieved a critical hit with Spirit of the Age, a series of six programmes about British architecture down the centuries.
Drummond's hopes of running a BBC department were dashed again in 1972 when the documentary film-maker Norman Swallow was brought in after Hearst left to become controller of Radio 3. In 1974, when Swallow returned to Granada and Drummond's name was again mooted as a successor, a group of senior producers privately lobbied against his appointment, arguing that his acerbic tongue was divisive. Instead, I resumed control of the joint department, insisting from the outset that Drummond should be my second-in-command. The In Performance strand he inaugurated on BBC2 was a model of eclectic programming, incorporating the best of ballet, opera and concert music virtually every weekend of the year.
By 1977, Drummond was convinced that his way forward at the BBC was blocked so long as Wheldon was in power. Relief came in the shape of an advertisement for the general manager's post at the Edinburgh festival. Unexpectedly, Wheldon supplied a glowing testimonial: "I have never met an artist who did not respect and admire him."
During his five-year spell in Scotland, Drummond applied his phenomenal energy to the annual task of planning a three-week festival which would be genuinely international in flavour and yet excite the interest of local audiences. The job required him to scour Europe for theatrical and operatic talent that would create a stir around the Royal Mile. Unfortunately, Edinburgh lacked the opera house resources that gave Salzburg, which had three opera stages, its pre-eminence in the festival field. In Drummond's time, Edinburgh had nothing save the hopelessly inadequate King's Theatre.
So his choice was limited to small-scale, home-grown productions, foreign company visits and whatever he could persuade the Glasgow-based Scottish Opera to give him by way of previews of their autumn season. 1980 was his best year for opera: the Cologne company (whose music director, John Pritchard, became a staunch supporter) brought Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto, Glasgow provided Berg's Wozzeck and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, and the festival itself produced a distinguished world premiere in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse.
In the field of international theatre, Drummond never bettered his first season, 1979, when he presented the Rustaveli Company, from Georgia, playing Brecht and Shakespeare. The following year he fell out spectacularly with the gifted but demanding Polish director Tadeusz Kantor ("a total shit") but put the Assembly Hall to effective use with Bill Bryden's masterly adaptation for the National Theatre of the York and Wakefield mystery plays.
The main thrust of the festival remained its classical music programmes at the Usher Hall. In 1980 he arranged a live relay of the Berlioz Te Deum with the main forces in that venue, accompanied, through the use of loudspeakers and video cameras, by the fine organ of St Mary's Cathedral. Innovations included the inauguration of the book fair and the commissioning of the Queen's Hall as a venue for chamber music. But financial constraints were arduous and interminable, and he declined the invitation to renew his contract.
After the concluding high of the Vienna 1900 theme in his final festival (1983), Drummond was hired by the Arts Council to report on the provision of a permanent home for dance in London. His recommendation - to take over the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane - was a pipe dream, and the report was shelved, but Drummond acquired sufficient prestige in the dance field to create (and administer from 1986 to 1994) the national dance co-ordination committee. His knowledge of dance, coupled with his operatic experience, made him one of the frontrunners to assume control of the Royal Opera House in succession to John Tooley, but in 1988 the job went to another media émigré, Jeremy Isaacs.
In 1985, Drummond had returned to the BBC at a much higher level than when he had left it. He was appointed controller of music, the first non-musician to hold the post. There was a long-standing anomaly that while the in-house symphony orchestras and the music broadcasts, including the Proms, were administered by Drummond's department, all the scheduling was in the hands of the controller of Radio 3, a post then held by Ian McIntyre, a journalist with no great sympathy for music.
But in 1987, the two controllerships were merged, and Drummond was exactly the right man for the new job. His intention was to change the perceived style of the network from that of a senior common room to an artists' cafe. He made a good choice of Andrew Davis as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1989, and inaugurated multi-faceted weekends of stimulating broadcast reportage from cultural centres as far afield as Berlin and Minneapolis/St Paul.
His chief joy and satisfaction derived from the planning of the two-month Prom season. His enthusiasm for new music was balanced by an acute historical perspective and a love of young people: he greatly increased the number of appearances by youth orchestras, upping it to five in the 1993 season. His European outlook also prompted an increase in the number of foreign orchestras (as many as 10 in 1995).
Drummond had relinquished control of Radio 3 in January 1992 (six months before his contract ran out) in order to mastermind a European arts festival, the brainchild of the then prime minister, John Major, who wanted something spectacular to celebrate Britain's chairmanship of the EC. Drummond devised a programme whose highlights included visits by Giorgio Strehler's Piccola Scala company from Milan, Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil from Paris and the Netherlands Dance Theatre.
He was only 60 when he finally left the BBC in 1995, the year of his knighthood, after presiding over the Proms centenary celebrations, spread cunningly over two seasons. That he possessed the vision and guts to run a major arts organisation was not in doubt, and he had at least one more major job in him. But he was ignored in the botched succession to Isaacs at Covent Garden in 1997, even though he was a master of the public relations skills in such short supply.
Without an official platform, Drummond withdrew to his study. He had already published a book about churchyard gravestones, A Fine and Private Place (with Joan Bakewell, 1977), and an entertaining account of his quest for Diaghilev, Speaking of Diaghilev (1997), based on the earlier documentary. His assistant on that film, Bob Lockyer, became a close friend - "central to my life" - though they did not share the same roof until Lockyer bought a cottage in Lewes, Sussex, in 1997.
Characteristically, Drummond used a launch party for his memoirs at the Edinburgh festival book fair in 2000 to dish out headline-gathering insults. Alan Yentob was dismissed as "a prat"; the government, he said, knew nothing about culture. Even Lord Evans, Drummond's publisher at Faber & Faber, was attacked as "one of those middle-aged men who wear baseball caps turned the wrong way round because they don't want to grow up".
What David Attenborough described as Drummond's "unlimited capacity for indignation" seems to have ruled him out of further employment in a conformist world dependent on public support and sponsorship. He continued to write and broadcast, but his energies were sapped by a mysterious illness which affected his spine; walking became difficult and he was prevented by ill health from attending the performances that had brought him such joy all his life. His was a life not tainted, but illuminated, by experience.
Brilliance and bluster
Nicholas Kenyon writes ...
John Drummond was perhaps one of the last great impresarios in a country that no longer seems to value his kind of total cultural confidence and bold artistic vision. He was imposing, inspirational, impatient, irritating, frighteningly secure in his tastes, ready to denounce anyone who disagreed with him, yet with a deep and attractive vulnerability, which endeared him even to those of us who regularly suffered the verbal lashes of his criticism. He was passionate in his support for excellence across all the arts, and regarded any attempt to compromise that excellence as a betrayal. (But he decided what was excellent.)
He was a brilliant, witty communicator, whether on the subject of Diaghilev, food, conductors or the Queen Mother; his turn of phrase was memorable; his range of friends, acquaintances and contacts was huge, and he never let us forget it. It was the creative artist he valued most deeply: he attracted to the Proms a new range of leading artists and glamorous orchestras, continuing the process of transforming a national event into a leading international festival. He had the good fortune to commission new music at a time when British music was flourishing: James Macmillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, John Tavener's The Protecting Veil and Harrison Birtwistle's Panic, which stunned the 1995 Last Night, were among the outstanding products of his era.
In the BBC today we have reaped the benefit of John's aggressive staying power, his determination that the BBC orchestras with their wide repertory should flourish, and that the Proms should express the heights of the BBC's commitment to great performance, adventurous music and living composers.
When he added Radio 3 to his responsibilities, his contribution to the cultural range of the network was magnificent, emphasising the speech output and defending its drama. But he continued to repel any attempt to modify its musical presentation and output, so when I succeeded him in 1992 and began to change the network, he was appalled. It was a period of some tension, yet we always remained on good terms. John did not take much notice of his listeners: "Dear Sir, If you are going to write to the chairman of the BBC complaining about me, you might as well spell his name correctly ..." Of one difficult composer he wrote to me, "I do not know whether, in fact, the BBC ever had a blacklist of composers, but could I suggest you start one now with the name ..."
John took offence easily, and gave offence too readily: he usually forgot the former quickly, though others did not always forget the latter. As a result he was sadly underused after he left the BBC. He was phenomenally good company as long as you didn't mind listening, and he was a lifelong friend if you could probe beneath the bluster to the warm, responsive humanity beneath.
· John Richard Gray Drummond, writer, broadcaster and arts administrator, born November 25 1934; died September 6 2006.