| 1993 |
January: In New York
for first meeting of the Editorial Board of The Kurt Weill Edition (D's
colleagues are: Stephen Hinton, Kim Kowalke, Giselher Schubert, and the
Managing Editor, Edward Harsh).
March-November:
extensive work with radio in Berlin (RIAS) regarding a projected performance of
a substantial concert excerpt from Weill-Werfel Der Weg der Verheissung.
Project eventually abandoned for want of funding support, etc.
March/April: Largo
release three CDs - Jonathan Lloyd; Roberto Gerhard; Stefan
Wolpe.
15 April-6 May:
Alternative Vienna at The South Bank Centre, in liaison with the
Austrian Institute and its Director, the novelist and poet, Peter
Marginter. Concerts by the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, the London
Sinfonietta, and the London Philharmonic, featuring music by Cerha, Gruber,
Ligeti, Schwertsik, Spinner; and a poets + music evening with H.C.
Artmann, and Gerhard Rühm.
 31 July: Santa Fe: attends production of
Weill-Kaiser double bill, and is a speaker at an introductory forum. Renews
acquaintance with the writer and librettist Arnold Sundgaard.
25 August: The BBC
Prom Concert at the Royal Albert Hall ends with a performance of Cry, the
Beloved Country, given by the Matrix Ensemble, a white and black chorus
(BBC Singers/London Adventist Chorale), Janet Suzman (narrator), Cynthia Clarey
(mezzo), and Damon Evans (tenor), conducted by Robert Ziegler.
November: Visits
Constant Permeke Museum in Jabbeke (Belgium). Sketches for a Permeke
project.
'Weill and
Schoenberg' in a Festschrift for O.W. Neighbour on his 70th
birthday.
|
| 1994 |
Five Largo CDs: HK Gruber;
Kurt Schwertsik; Friedrich Cerha; Igor Markevitch; Spike Hughes.
23-27 February: Guest
of DeutschlandRadio (ex RIAS) for preliminary discussions of their plans to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and the events
of 1945 in general. Three months later a formal agreement is reached with
DeutschlandRadio, and by then, a related Largo Records project involving
Noam Sheriff has already taken shape. The commitment to DeutschlandRadio
over the next month is extensive.
25-26 April: visits
Paul Bowles in Tangier.
Spring/summer:
University of California Press, Faber's prospective partner as publisher
of WEILL: LIFE & WORKS, express new interest in a volume or
volumes containing the chapters on the works. Copies of a book-length
typescript are submitted on 29 August.
September: Notes
on the rediscovery of the composer Markevitch published in
Tempo.
October:
Górecki's Millions published in London Review of
Books.
|
| 1995 |
Early in the New Year,
DeutschlandRadio is obliged to abandon its plans for the 1945 commemoration,
owing to lack of the hoped-for support. Testimonies of War
1914-45, a double-CD produced for Largo, will however be launched at
the Berlin Festival in September. The equivalent of one CD is devoted to
orchestral works by Boris Blacher.
Stephanie
Padilla-Kaltenborn joins the Largo Records team in Cologne. Now that Uwe
Buschkötter has established a base for Largo Records in New York, her
American background and experience are invaluable. Largo Records will now
expand its operations in Germany and the USA, and arrange for Drew to open a
London office.
'Retrospectrum', the
third and last of the Largo CDs of music by Goldschmidt, takes its name
from the title of his 1991 String Trio.
July: The University
of California Press receives two independent reports from readers of the
LIFE & WORKS manuscript. Neither is in principle opposed to
publication, but both serve to strengthen the author's own conviction that
after a lapse of 20 years, the manuscript requires radical reconstruction and a
long period of undivided attention.
September: The fourth
Largo CD of the year is of a dance score by John Cage.
October: At a ceremony
in the Spanish Ministry of Culture (Madrid) Drew receives their Silver
Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts 'for services to Spanish Music'.
Publications:
Christopher Shaw (1924-1995) in Tempo; Britten and
his fellow composers in On Mahler and Britten- essays in Honour of
Donald Mitchell on his Seventieth Birthday; Wolfgang von
Schweinitz, in Contemporary Composers.
|
| 1996 |
28 February:
States of Shock: Darmstadt and the Older Generation, lecture in
the series organised by Christopher Wintle for King's College,
London.
March: Release of
Paul Bowles CD; publication in BBC Music Magazine of an article
on his music, Beneath the Sheltering Sky.
Spring-autumn:
Collaboration with the Irish composer Gerald Barry with a view to
editing and releasing on CD the recording of his TV opera The Triumph of
Beauty and Deceit. A Gordian knot of practical and other difficulties is
eventually untied, thanks to the good will of all concerned. The CD is released
by Largo together with a second Gerhard CD.
21 July: At a
post-Prom ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall, followed by a reception jointly
hosted by The Kurt Weill Foundation and the BBC, Kim Kowalke
presents D with the Foundation's 'Distinguished Achievement Award' - of
which Maurice Abravanel had been the first recipient and Lys Symonette will be
the third.
August: resumes work
on Propheten (Weill). Discussions in Brussels with Noam
Sheriff, who agrees about the almost insoluble problems of emulating
Weill's orchestral style, and bravely offers to attempt suitable orchestrations
for the passages in Propheten which Weill had left in vocal
score.
5 September: During a
day in hospital, begins a book provisionally entitled TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN
COMPOSER. Though connected with a Largo project that will be cancelled
18 months later, the book is designed to stand on its own.
17 October: Death of
Berthold Goldschmidt, in the Hampstead home he has occupied since 1935.
After a decade of belated discovery and growing fame in mainland Europe, he had
been due to pay his first official visit to New York.
|
| 1997 |
February: In Illinois,
researching TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN COMPOSER; then in New York with
Uwe Buschkötter and colleagues from Cologne for talks with EMI's American
label, Angel.
1 April: Angel Records
sign a Distribution Agreement with Largo Records for the USA. The London
office of Largo is expanded.
Incognito - Berthold
Goldschmidt (1903-1996) is published in the April issue of Tempo
(no.200).
November-December:
Five Largo releases in Europe and the USA: Alexander Krein; Schwertsik; Tom
Phillips; Andrew Toovey (2 separate CDs). Meetings in Cologne with the
American-born composer John McGuire. Intensive collaboration with Edward
Harsh, Managing Editor of the Kurt Weill Edition, regarding editing and
production of the now urgently required performance material for
Propheten.
|
| 1998 |
Four Largo CDs: York
Höller; John McGuire; Boris Blacher; Kurt Schwertsik. 
February: In Los
Angeles with Uwe Buschkötter and Stephanie
Padilla-Kaltenborn for the annual conference of the American Association of
Music Personnel in Public Radio; Schwertsik and his wife Christa give a
programme of songs and readings at the Biltmore Hotel, linking the American
release of Largo's 'House and Court Music' CD to the forthcoming release of
their own Largo CD re-ordered and re-packaged as 'For Christa'.
While in LA, Drew discusses
with Uwe Buschkötter three salient topics; (1) Largo's four American and
European releases for the present quarter, (2) recording sessions already
scheduled for the remainder of the year, and (3) the implications for the next
four years of a recording programme intended gradually and consistently to
incorporate music of earlier centuries with a view to establishing a more
eclectic and viable independent catalogue in the new Millennium.
March: Two-year
consultancy at the South Bank Centre, liaising with Amelia Freedman and
colleagues with regard to planning Weill Centenary events in
2000.
early April: Friendly
but unproductive discussions in Hamburg between the Largo team and two senior
executives at Deutsche Grammophon regarding a prospective collaboration.
(Before a year is out, both DG representatives will have left the company). In
the classical CD industry generally, brave talk about 'niche markets' is
another symptom of the crisis that has enveloped all the major classical labels
and most of the 'independents' since the mid-1990s.
28 April: Largo
Records is obliged to cancel scheduled recording sessions, and freeze its
5-year production programme. The London team is disbanded and the office closed
in June. The first release in a projected Mendelssohn series by the Endellion
Quartet and an internationally renowned pianist is the earliest casualty of the
closure; the second is a CD of sacred choral music by Bernard Naylor, to
be conducted by Louis Halsey; and the third is the complete piano music
of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, to be recorded by Rolf Hind.
. 
May: York
Höller in London for the recording sessions on 8 May of his
Fanal , with John Wallace (trumpet) and the London Sinfonietta
conducted by Hans Zender.
28May/ 26 July: World
premiere of Propheten at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, followed by
the British premiere (at the BBC Proms, which had commissioned D's work). The
programme-notes and essays for both events are amalgamated and revised in the
form of an article to be published in the September/October issue of Tempo
(no.206) 'Der Weg der Verheissung' and the Prophecies of
Jeremiah. Its sequel will be published in April 1999.
August:Begins the main
task of the coming years - WEILL AT 25, a full scale replacement
for the first volume of the discarded Life and Works.
4 December: 'The
Paradise of the Idea' - an essay on Milhaud's and Claudel's opera
Christophe Colomb, published in the TLS as an extended review of the recent
Berlin production by Peter Greenaway. |
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