About the Author

Humphrey Burton read Music and History at Cambridge University and entered the BBC as a sound studio manager in 1955. In 1958 he joined the ground-breaking TV arts magazine, 'Monitor'. He has won many international awards, including three from the British Academy, four Emmies and the Italia Prize (for The Making of West Side Story).

Twice in charge of Music and Arts for BBC Television, Burton was also a founder member of London Weekend Television, where he edited and presented the ITV arts series 'Aquarius'. He is still active in the fields of radio and television.

To celebrate his seventieth birthday in March 2001 he conducted a charity gala performance of Verdi's 'Requiem' at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of prostate cancer.

Burton worked with Yehudi Menuhin on many radio and television programmes, including a 20-part radio series for Classic FM. He was also a frequent collaborator with Leonard Bernstein, and later wrote his biography, also published by Faber. He was awarded a CBE in the Millennium honours., Born in 1931, Humphrey Burton, CBE, was educated at Long Dene, a co-educational progressive school, and the Judd School, Tonbridge. After military service in the Royal Signals he read music and history at Cambridge and spent a year in France researching eighteenth-century musical life before joining the BBC in 1955 as a studio manager. He was recruited to the ground-breaking TV arts magazine Monitor three years later, rising to become the first head of the BBC's music and arts department and winning the British Academy's top award for creative programme-making. This was the first of many UK and international honours for such programmes as The Golden Ring and The Making of West Side Story. Between 1967 and 1975 Burton was a founder member of London Weekend Television, editing and hosting ITV's popular arts series Aquarius. After a second spell as a BBC boss, he retired from management at the age of fifty and has since concentrated on direction, broadcasting, writing and impresario duties at the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood and the Barbican Centre. In recent years he has branched out as a worldwide cruise director and lecturer on musical subjects.

Burton worked with Yehudi Menuhin on many radio and television programmes, including a twenty-part biography for Classic FM entitled Menuhin: Master Musician - of which a revised version is to be broadcast in 2016. He was also a frequent collaborator of Leonard Bernstein, producing a dozen documentaries and directing close on two hundred filmed concerts: his widely-praised Bernstein biography is also published by Faber.

Reviews

Flamboyant composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), who was America's ambassador to the world of serious music for most of his jam-packed life, has long needed a sober, well-researched and encompassing biography, and this is it. There have been tactful hagiographies (John Gruen), malicious deconstructions (Joan Peyser) and ambivalent inside stories (Burton Bernstein); but Burton, a British TV producer who knew Bernstein well but was no acolyte, has created, with the aid of family archives, a wealth of interviews and an interested layperson's sound musical knowledge, a full-length study unlikely to be surpassed. It is in many ways a tragic story, not of genius unrecognized--if anything Bernstein was overpraised in his life, both as composer and conductor--but of a protean nature overcome by the demands of celebrity status and an overweening ego. From the start ``Lenny'' was a determinedly colorful character, insistent on the limelight, extravagant of gesture and emotion. Whether he could have become a great composer, rather than a highly talented musical entertainer whose best-remembered work remains his Broadway musicals, will never be known; for his whole professional life was an agonized tightrope walk between the frenzies of adulation that greeted his conducting and his guilty sense that he was betraying his creative gift by not spending more time in the workroom. And even the slim body of work he did create in his crowded life emerged more often than not from collaborations with lyricists and librettists, almost as if he was afraid to be alone with his muse. Bernstein was a man who owed much to his Jewish heritage (and Burton adroitly notes how much of his serious music had Jewish roots) and experienced a strong sense of guilt about his bisexuality, particularly after the death of his betrayed wife Felicia. But as the reader begins to wonder whether such anguish is inescapable for a non-heterosexual American artist, there is the example of Bernstein's friend Aaron Copland to ponder: a man secure in his gay sexuality who created what is arguably a much more lasting body of work and had a greater influence on the musical life of his time. The fact that a biography can raise such questions is a tribute to the tact and imagination that infuse this one. Bernstein owes Burton a posthumous hug for having told it straight, with affection but no blinkers. Photos. (May)