Gerard McBurney is a British composer, arranger, musicologist, television and radio presenter, teacher, writer, and translator. He was born in Cambridge on June 20, 1954, to American archaeologist Charles McBurney and Anna Frances Edmonstone. He studied at Cambridge and the Moscow State Conservatory, where his teachers included Edison Denisov and Roman Ledenev. He knew Alfred Schnittke and was in contact with Sofia Gubaidulina.
From 1984 to 1993, McBurney taught composition and twentieth-century music at the London College of Music. From 1994, he lectured on Russian and English music at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the University of Manchester’s School of Music and Drama. He also worked as a creative adviser with orchestras and performers, including the Hallé Orchestra, the theatre company Complicité, and Lincoln Center.
From 1985, McBurney worked for two decades in the BBC’s Russian- and English-language services, presenting hundreds of programmes on BBC Radio 3. His programmes also aired on other stations in Britain, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. He wrote and presented more than 20 documentaries for British and German television, including films about Sergei Rachmaninoff and Gaetano Donizetti. With Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre, he helped make a film about the history of Russian music.
McBurney is known for his work with Dmitri Shostakovich’s music. He orchestrated a number of the composer’s works, including music for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug, restored the music for the ballet Conditionally Murdered, made a chamber version of the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki, and orchestrated romances setting poems by Alexander Pushkin. In 2009, he orchestrated Shostakovich’s unfinished opera Orango; McBurney’s reconstruction received its first performance in December 2011 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
In September 2006, McBurney became creative consultant to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of its multimedia series Beyond the Score. The 30 projects he developed for the series combined orchestral music with forms including ballet, chamber opera, songs, chamber music, and theatre. Subjects included works by Bartók, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Holst, Vivaldi, Mussorgsky and Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Wagner, Sibelius, Dvořák, and Debussy.
McBurney’s compositions include works for piano, chamber ensembles, voice, and choir. They include Thirst, for cello and piano, written in memory of Jacqueline du Pré (1987); White Nights, an orchestral choreographic fantasy based on Fyodor Dostoevsky (1992); A Man Came Out of the House, musical scenes based on the works of Daniil Kharms (1994); A Winter Walk Around the Park in Troitsa-Lykovo (1995); and Letters to Heaven, setting words by Kharms for bass-baritone and orchestra (1998). His published research has focused mainly on Russian and Soviet music, and his articles have appeared in major periodicals in Europe and America.