DavidDrew

Aug 4 2009 by William Leece, Liverpool Daily Post

NO MODERN orchestral work premiered in Liverpool has had anything like the impact of HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!

Since that unforgettable world premiere at the Philharmonic Hall with Simon Rattle in 1978, Frankenstein!! has gone round the world. Only Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio can have matched it – but there again, the composer was an ex-Beatle.

Frankenstein!! came to pass in Liverpool partly because the Philharmonic’s then principal conductor was Walter Weller, who moved in the same Viennese musical circles as Gruber.

But another grey eminence behind its arrival in the city was David Drew, champion of Kurt Weill and the Third Viennese School of composers who followed him, and recently arrived as director of publications for Boosey and Hawkes.

He had studied English and history at Cambridge in the early 1950s, but had also been influenced by the composer and critic Wilfrid Mellers and his colleague Roberto Gerhard.

David Drew’s first interests were in modern French music, and in his 20s he published a study of Olivier Messaien that was a classic of its time.

But he had also started to study and research the Viennese-born Kurt Weill, writer, with Bertolt Brecht, of The Threepenny Opera.

Weill was not one of the giants among 20th century composers. But he was one of the most interesting, with a career that arced from the days of the Weimar Republic in Germany to Broadway and Hollywood, where he died relatively young aged 50.

From Weill he moved on naturally to those German and Austrian composers whose work had been so influenced one way or another by the Nazis, men like Hanns Eisler, Kurt Schwertsik and HK Gruber.

He had joined Boosey and Hawkes in 1976, and gently encouraged those composers he felt an affinity with.

The results have often been remarkable: Gruber is now one of the most bankable of modern composers, mainly thanks to that Liverpool performance, while Henryk Gorecki has found a new lease of life.

David Drew, musicologist and authorBorn, September 13, 1930; died, July 25, 2009