Wilton's interior

David Drew
British writer, editor, music publisher, recording producer

Annual Records 1999-2000
Wilton's Music Hall (Broomhill Opera), The Beggar's Opera, Fanferlizzy, Sir William Glock, Goehr in South Africa

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1999

January: At a forum on 20th century music sponsored by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra in conjunction with its current season and in particular the commissioned work by John Adams, D gives an informal talk with musical illustrations about the work of Darius Milhaud (implicitly a critique of views expressed in his 'French Music' contribution to the 1957 Hartog symposium) and takes part in a round-table discussion with musicologists including Christopher Hailey (organiser of the forum), Katherine Bergeron, David Schiff, and Richard Taruskin.

March: Broomhill Opera stage The Silver Lake, 'A Winter's Tale' by Georg Kaiser and Kurt Weill, in a new translation by Rory Bremner. Mark Dornford-May and Charles Hazlewood - respectively, Artistic and Musical Directors of Broomhill Opera - had consulted DD regarding this production, after his original approach to Broomhill in connection with the Largo recording of the opera The Juniper Tree by Andrew Toovey.

1 April: Start of 2-year appointment as Musical and Literary Adviser to Broomhill Opera at Wilton's Music Hall, London. The first production with which D will be directly involved is Jonathan Miller's - of The Beggar's Opera. The choice of 'arranger' is recognized as crucial.

April: Der Weg der Verheissung: Weill at the Crossroads, in Tempo No.208.

Wilton's Music Hall

April-May: Outlines for a Darius Milhaud double bil at Wiltons. Later projects include a commission for a young British composer, and a first UK production of a major work by Karl Amadeus Hartmann.

14 May: The Nature of the Fire (on Hans Werner Henze's autobiography), TLS.

19 June: D gives the second in the series of annual Goldschmidt Lectures at Trinity College of Music. His paper, Silhouettes of The Unknown Composer (see September 1996 for related theme but different subject-matter) proceeds from the broadly philosophical question to specific instances taken from the 18th to the 20th centuries and ending with the still virtually unresearched life and work of Robert Müller-Hartmann.

11-13 June: : The Kurt Weill Centenary year is officially inaugurated in Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx Stadt). Headed by Kim Kowalke, Board members and staff of the Kurt Weill Foundation have travelled from New York for the world premiere in the original language of the Weill-Werfel Biblical saga Der Weg Der Verheissung. At a conference attended by scholars active in Weill studies in recent decades, DD delivers part of an informal paper which will be published in its definitive form under the title Reinhardt's Choice: Some Alternatives to Weill? The talk is not well received, and there is some heckling.

Kim Kowalke, Richard von Weizsäcker Karl Marx, Chemnitz 

July: The Broomhill/Wilton's production of The Beggar's Opera is scheduled to open in November. The Broomhill team agree that in the half century since Benjamin Britten composed his masterly version for the English Opera Group, John Gay's original ballad opera has been overshadowed by The Threepenny Opera. From a strong list of possible candidates as composer/arranger, Mark Dornford-May and Charles Hazlewood choose Jonathan Lloyd. The director will be Jonathan Miller.

Late summer: After a meeting with D in Dorset, Jonathan Lloyd accepts the Beggar's Opera commission and begins work on Gay's 69 songs and airs. Strictly on schedule, the score will reach D batch-by-batch over the next three months, with each package followed a day or so later by a phone call.

September: The Editors of the revised New Grove have for some while, and rightly, been pressing D for his overdue contributions, of which much the largest will be a promised revision of the Weill entry. D's belated discovery of explicit objections in Opera Grove to his 1980 entry leads to the further discovery that a revision of his entire text has just been completed by J. Bradford Robinson, an American writer and musician resident in Germany and currently preparing a volume for the Kurt Weill Edition. D asks for, and receives, the revised text.

17-20 September: At the Opera in Dortmund, attends rehearsals and premiere - on the 19th - of Kantan/The Silk Drum, a Noh-play diptych-with-epilogue by Alexander Goehr. On the 21st, discussions in Hannover with J. Bradford Robinson about his revision of the 1980 Grove entry and his volume for KWE.

October: First series of Weill events at South Bank Centre, London, including Cry, The Beloved Country, and a definitively revised Happy End sequence.

4 November: Premiere at Wilton's Music Hall of the Lloyd/Miller Beggar's Opera. Schwertsik, Gruber, and friends, have travelled from Vienna for the occasion. The press is mixed, and preponderantly unsympathetic.

26 November - May 2000: Continuous work on the revised New Grove.

Jonathan Miller and Jonathan Lloyd   Charles Hazlewood

Broomhill Opera: The Beggar's Opera in rehearsal at Wilton's Music Hall
left Jonathan Miller with Jonathan Lloyd.
right Cast and band, with conductor Charles Hazlewood (centre, in black)


Photos © 2000 by David Drew


2000

17-20 February: In Dessau for the first time since 1963; at a conference in the Bauhaus organised by the Kurt Weill Centre (Dessau) and attended by (among others) Kim Kowalke, Lys Symonette, and the conductor John Mauceri, D delivers a paper on Weill-reception 1950-75.

2 March: At London's South Bank Centre (Queen Elizabeth Hall) on the very evening of the centenary of Weill's birth in Dessau, Gruber conducts the Ensemble Modern and a full cast of singers in a concert performance of Die Dreigroschenoper based on the text edited for the KWE by Stephen Hinton and Edward Harsh.

1 April: The pianist Katharina Wolpe, and the Vice-President of the Stefan Wolpe Society (New York), Austin Clarkson, invite DD to assist with the planning of concerts in the UK celebrating the Wolpe Centenary in August 2002.

17 June: At the Aldeburgh Festival (Snape Maltings) Thomas Adès conducts Weill's Das Berliner Requiem in a version by D intended to supersede the one he published in 1967 . The performance will be repeated at the BBC Proms on 27 July. As a small token of gratitude and admiration, D gives Adès a copy of Largo's Gerald Barry CD (The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit). A few days later Adès writes to report that he finds the piece thrilling, and has already arranged with the Aldeburgh Festival to mount the first stage production in 2002, with himself as conductor.

28 June: While in Vienna for a conference at the Literaturkreis, DD receives news of the death of Sir William Glock at his Oxfordshire home, aged 92. D is Co-Executor of Sir William's Will.

19-20 July: In Montpellier for the French premiere of Propheten.

8 August: In the light of observations and experiences during the celebrations of the Weill centenary, begins the monograph intended to form the centre-piece of the new Volume 1, now entitled WEILL AT 25.

Autumn/Winter 2000/01: Visits to the former home of Sir William Glock for work on his papers etc.

11-19 November: In Stellenbosch (Spier Centre) and Cape Town with Alexander Goehr as guests of Broomhill Opera and the Spier Trust to research a music-theatre project. Stage rehearsals in Stellenbosch, school performances at the Spier Theatre, choir rehearsals in the townships; visit to the site of the former prison camp on Robben Island.

Robben Island prison compound   Goehr on Robben Island
Cape Town ( in the townships   A township choir-rehearsal

photos © 2000 by David Drew

November-December: At Wilton's Music Hall working with Broomhill Opera on the first professional production in the UK of Fanferlizzy, the opera by Kurt Schwertsik first performed in Stuttgart in 1983 (see above). 500 school-children from Tower Hamlets are involved in scenic aspects of the production (designer Wayne Hemingway), which opens on 13 December. The composer attends the final week of rehearsals, and is fêted by cast and orchestra.

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Material Copyright © 2002 David Drew.