| Biography | Gerard McBurney is a British composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher and writer.
Born in Cambridge, England, he is the son of Charles McBurney, an American archaeologist, and Anne Francis Edmondstone (née Charles), who was a British secretary of English, Scots, and Irish ancestry. Gerard's younger brother is Simon McBurney, an English actor, writer and director.
Gerard was educated at Winchester College, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read English Literature and at the Moscow Conservatory. For many years he lived in London, teaching first at the London College of Music and later, for 12 years, at the Royal Academy of Music. He also worked as artistic advisor with various orchestras, performers and presenters including The Hallé, Complicite and Lincoln Center.
In September 2006, he was appointed Artistic Programming Advisor to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Creative Director of the CSO's multimedia series Beyond the Score.
His original compositions include orchestral works, a ballet, a chamber opera, songs and chamber music as well as many theater scores. He also is well known for his reconstructions of various lost and forgotten works by Dmitri Shostakovich.
As a scholar, he has published mostly in the field of Russian and Soviet music. For 20 years, he created and presented many hundreds of programmes on BBC Radio 3 (the classical music station of the British Broadcasting Corporation) as well as occasional programmes for other radio stations in the U.K., Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Gerard McBurney has written, researched and presented more than two dozen documentary television films for British and German television channels, mostly working with the director Barrie Gavin.
His reconstruction of Shostakovich's recently discovered operatic fragment Orango was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2011. |