Gerard McBurney

Gerard McBurney (b. 1954) is a British composer, arranger, educator, broadcaster, musicologist and writer. Often credited as Liner Notes author. He studied at Cambridge and the Moscow Conservatory. After returning to the UK, Gerard had been teaching at the London College of Music and later at the Royal Academy of Music. In September 2006, McBurney became an artistic programming advisor to The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and creative director of the CSO's multimedia series Beyond the Score. He also acted as a music advisor to various ensembles and organizations, including Theatre De Complicite, Hallé Orchestra, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. McBurney has worked in broadcasting since 1985, in both English and Russian, and presented hundreds of programs on BBC Radio 3. As a scholar, he has published mostly in the field of Russian and Soviet music, and served as the consultant on music from Russia for Boosey & Hawkes in 1991–2005. Also, Gerard has been researching and writing for documentary films since 1987, particularly several done with director Barrie Gavin. Original compositions of McBurney include orchestral works, ballet, chamber pieces for various ensembles, scores for silent films, as well as many theater scores. He is also very well known for arrangements of Dmitri Shostakovich and reconstructions of composer's various lost and unknown works. A reconstruction of Shostakovich's recently discovered opera fragment Orango was premiered by Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in December 2011.