Gerard McBurney is a British composer, writer, and deviser, working in theater, radio, television, and concert hall. His collaborators include Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé, the Southbank and Barbican Centres, Lincoln Center, the festivals in Lucerne and Aix-en-Provence, and several internationally renowned orchestras. He has directed productions of Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, the massive Genesis Suite created by seven composers, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, among others.
McBurney has researched and presented documentary films on subjects including Sergei Rachmaninov, Hildegard of Bingen, Gaetano Donizetti, and Mark Anthony Turnage. Between 1982 and 2006, he was a well-known profile on BBC Radio 3. For over a decade, he worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as Artistic Programming Advisor, among other things being involved in its successful Beyond the Score project. As a composer, he has written orchestral and chamber music, theatre pieces, songs and choral music. Notable works include the ballet White Nights, community chamber opera The Airman’s Tale, and chamber pieces Desire and Stones and Trees.
After two years as a postgraduate student at the Moscow Conservatory, McBurney has had a particular interest in Russian music. This has led to projects including reconstructions of lost or forgotten pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich, such as the opera Orango from 1932, music hall show Hypothetically Murdered from 1931, and a second jazz suite from 1938. The reimagining of Modest Mussorgsky’s epic opera Khovanshchina is his latest large project.