Gerard McBurney is a composer and orchestrator, writer, lecturer, broadcaster and deviser, particularly known for his completions and reconstructions of lost and forgotten works by Shostakovich.
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 in the theatre and with symphony orchestras.
In 2006 he moved to the US as creative director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beyond the Score programme, pioneering and developing new approaches to audience development. He has collaborated with many leading American orchestras and is currently creative consultant at 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 own music includes symphonic, vocal and chamber music, as well as several chamber operas and an orchestral ballet based on Dostoyevsky’s novella White Nights. Current compositions include a solo cello cycle for the American cellist Alisa Weilerstein as part of her evolving Fragments series; and 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, written in memory of two close friends, both composers, who died in the recent pandemic.
