PERSPECTIVE — Gerard McBurney has been called by many names: composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher, writer, and, most recently, creative consultant to the San Diego Symphony. His own career description adds “deviser” and “concert-performance director, working in radio and television, with orchestras, classical soloists, theater and opera companies, scholars, popular audiences and in the world of online presentation.” All are accurate, but until he left the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for San Diego in 2017, no one had quite captured for him what his prolific and nomadic career had really been about.
Then, in 2016, a Chicago neighbor he had converted to classical music invited McBurney to a farewell party in their backyard. To McBurney’s surprise, the tent was packed with friends and at least one musical eminence, Yo-Yo Ma. But the bigger surprise was the movie his neighbor, a computer executive, had made and showed McBurney and his wife Alison after the party. In the movie, titled The English Storyteller, everyone from globetrotting conductors to neighborhood kids feted McBurney. “Everything you do,” his neighbor insisted, “is about telling stories.”
The handle fits. The 40-odd scores McBurney’s composed, the 20-plus works by Shostakovich, Weill, and others he’s arranged or orchestrated, the 30-plus deep-dive “Beyond the Score” concerts he directed for the CSO, and the countless documentaries and BBC Radio 3 shows he’s contributed to have all been about telling stories. Speaking recently from his Scotland home, McBurney, 71, explained: “If you bump into somebody on the street and you say, ‘Come and listen to my opera,’ they go, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to.’ But if you tell the right story, they’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a try,’ and it can be beautiful.”
McBurney’s story this month is a semi-staging of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which the San Diego Symphony will present May 22 and 24 on a double bill with Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra led by music director Rafael Payare.
Raised in Cambridge by an American-born archaeologist, McBurney grew up with a dual passion for literature and music. While studying English literature at Cambridge University, he spent a year in London learning composition under Boulez pupil/translator Susan Bradshaw (“my musical mum”). “I’ve spent a lot of my life writing music,” he admits, “but I just thought it was an eccentric itch I had to scratch.” At 30, he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory “to go to a world where people were very different from us and were writing music in a very different way.”
Russia changed everything. Leveraging the networks of Bradshaw and Mstislav Rostropovich pupil Elizabeth Wilson, McBurney soon met Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s widow, Irina. Wilson commissioned McBurney to arrange a Shostakovich theater-music piece for piano trio, and legendary Soviet conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky heard it. Inviting McBurney to his dacha outside Moscow, Rozhdestvensky handed him photos of Shostakovich’s handwritten piano sketches for Hypothetically Murdered, a satirical music-revue piece composed in 1931 but subsequently lost. Instructed to reconstruct and orchestrate it into a suite, McBurney helped Mark Elder and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra record it for Hyperion.
Thus began the interplay between serendipity and storytelling that has marked McBurney’s career. “That moment was a kind of swerve point for me because it was a complete accident. I had no particular interest in Shostakovich. I didn’t know why [Rozhdestvensky] was giving it to me, but I was always interested in orchestration, and I was determined to understand the rather peculiar, acidic style of Shostakovich’s orchestration in his early works, a kind of curious amalgam of film music, popular music, and Offenbach.”
McBurney’s Hypothetically Murdered gained dozens of performances, prompting Irina to allow McBurney to arrange a 1930s dance-band ensemble version of her husband’s musical comedy Moscow, Cheryomushki (1959). “My version has had multiple productions all over Russia and around the world, including Indonesia and Australia. I had the chance to re-orchestrate something by a very, very famous composer. It was incredibly useful. It was like the best composition lesson you could possibly have.”
Other Shostakovich projects followed: an orchestrated performing version of the prologue to the 1932 opera Orango from a voice-and-piano sketch (premiered by the LA Philharmonic in 2011) and a reconstruction/orchestration of a performing version of the Shostakovich’s second Suite for Jazz Orchestra (1938).
But a definite highlight of McBurney’s career as a musical archaeologist cum ghost collaborator is Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. In fashioning a new 80-bar transition to the ending of the unfinished opera based on a rediscovered Mussorgsky manuscript, McBurney was suddenly collaborating with Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Shostakovich in producing a version that walked the tightrope between respecting and acknowledging the fragmentary nature of the unfinished original and seamlessly bridging the stylistic differences between Shostakovich’s 1959 version and Stravinsky’s 1913 conclusion.
Staged to acclaim at the 2025 Salzburg Easter Festival, McBurney describes his score as seeking “a way of making the Stravinsky ending work. Because if you just go from the Shostakovich to the Stravinsky, you get kind of whiplash because the two languages are so different. So I was creating a kind of wasteland, like we’re walking out over a sort of desert, and there are just fragments of the very last thoughts [Mussorgsky] put onto paper. And then out of this desert comes the Stravinsky, which is basically the voice of another world.”
McBurney is modest about his contribution: “There are lots of people even now working on this piece. I did this particular solution for my brother’s [director Simon McBurney] very specific idea of the dramaturgy he had in his mind.” But if his is not the definitive replacement of Shostakovich/Stravinsky’s version, it could well become a go-to modern performing version.
New orchestration projects have followed: chamber orchestral arrangements of little-known keyboard pieces by Wagner, Bruckner, and Berlioz for Royal Academy of Music and Trevor Pinnock, and a full orchestration of Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens for baritone Christian Gerhaher (“one of my favorite singers in the world”), both due out in 2027.
The compositional lessons McBurney has serendipitously learned from Shostakovich et al. have surely influenced his own varied oeuvre, which ranges from the haunting Hildegard Quartet (commissioned by Kronos Quartet) and White Nights (after Dostoevsky for English National Ballet) to Sehnsucht for cello and piano (dedicated to Jacqueline du Pré) and Desire – Reflections in a Poet’s Eye (a “musical peepshow” inspired by Gennady Rozhdestvensky). Though McBurney claims Peter Maxwell Davies as his biggest influence, British composer Julian Anderson once told him, “Your music is basically diatonic, but it’s doing its best to pretend it isn’t.”
Against McBurney’s compositions and arrangements, his hundreds of programs for BBC Radio 3, more than two dozen documentaries (many with Barrie Gavin), and consulting work (for the CSO and San Diego) may seem like second-order feats. McBurney rejects such thinking as snobbery. They’re all storytelling:
“For 20 years of my life, Radio 3 was really one of the principal ways I earned my living. I really covered the waterfront. Basically, all they needed was a chatterbox with a certain amount of fizz in front of a microphone, who could make the discovery of this music seem interesting to somebody at home on a Sunday morning who’s wondering whether they want to go to a cricket match or go listen to the concert or whatever. I loved doing it because I love people and talking. I was really, really lucky, because everything that people asked me to do was interesting.”
Out of McBurney’s radio and documentary work grew his 11-year stint as artistic programming advisor to the Chicago Symphony and becoming the creative genius behind the orchestra’s celebrated “Beyond the Score” concerts — narration, theater, visuals, and orchestral demonstration melded together to make Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and 30 other masterworks come alive. “I was trying to make ‘Beyond the Score’ for people like [my neighbors] who had never heard the name Dvořák in their lives, don’t know how to pronounce it, and they don’t really know what a symphony is. Well, most people don’t know what a symphony is.”
When Martha Gilmer, then the CSO’s VP for artistic planning and McBurney’s “Beyond the Score” co-conspirator, became CEO of the San Diego Symphony, McBurney found a new field in which to weave his stories. Memorable projects have included Wagner’s Die Walküre, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, all brought to life with vivid sets, lighting, and even pyrotechnics. In his semi-staging of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle this month, McBurney vows to “make the show as dramatic as possible.”
Symphony director of communications Cathy Strauss describes McBurney’s role concretely: “In addition to his responsibilities for the additional dramatic parts of our concert presentations, he is an integral part of every season’s programming — he’s in those discussions with Martha and Rafael when they select concert repertoire. He is part of every program in some way and very much a continuing resource throughout the season to many people throughout the Symphony.”
McBurney puts it like this: “I have a tremendous privilege of some cultural influence perhaps, but no responsibility, because it’s not my job to make the figures balance at the end of the year. I’m just there to be a sort of agitator, an enthusiast in the middle, a cheerleader, to get everybody excited before the game.”
