GERARD McBURNEY

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Gerard McBurney was born in Cambridge, England, in 1954. After post-graduate study at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1980s, he spent many years in London, teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, making radio and television programmes, and working as a theatre composer and with symphony orchestras.

In 2006 he moved to the US to be Creative Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beyond the Score programme, pioneering and developing new approaches to audience development. Since 2017, he has been Creative Consultant with the San Diego Symphony. 

He collaborates frequently with his brother, actor, writer and director Simon McBurney, most recently on a new production of Berg’s Wozzeck at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle. Their next upcoming project together is a new version of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, with Esa-Pekka Salonen at the 2025 Salzburg Easter Festival.

His compositions include symphonic, vocal and chamber music, a chamber opera and an orchestral ballet based on Dostoyevsky’s novella White Nights. Current projects include a large-scale orchestral piece based on his love of the landscape of the Highlands of Scotland and the ancient music of the Scottish bagpipe, and written in memory of two close friends, victims of the recent pandemic.

Photo: Matthias von der Tann