David Drew

Who was David Drew?

David Drew was a British journalist on music, particularly known for his work on Kurt Weill. He published the authoritative catalogue of Weill's music, Kurt Weill: A Handbook and, in German, edited and annotated a collection of Weill's writings, Kurt Weill: Ausgewählte Schriften, and a symposium of writings by others about Weill, Über Kurt Weill. He also produced performing editions of many of Weill's works and devised the significant celebration and revival of many of Weill's works at the 1975 Berliner Musikfest; much of this project was later recorded by the participating artists and the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Atherton and issued by the Decca Record Company in 1976.

Other composers he was known for advocating were the Pole Henryk Górecki, Americans Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, Germans and Austrians HK Gruber, Kurt Schwertsik, Berthold Goldschmidt, Leopold Spinner, Boris Blacher and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, Italian Luigi Dallapiccola, Catalan exile Roberto Gerhard, conductor-composer Igor Markevitch and British composers Alexander Goehr, Robin Holloway, Christopher Shaw and Walter Leigh. He first drew attention with the first important articles on Olivier Messiaen to be published in English, in the journal The Score, and his 60-page chapter on 'Modern French Music', in the 1957 symposium European Music in the Twentieth Century edited by Howard Hartog.