Andrew Burn
Role: Steering Group
Andrew Burn joined the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 1993 and is Head of Educations and Ensembles and a member of the company’s senior management team. After reading music at the University of East Anglia, his career has been in music/arts administration working for English National Opera, the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. During his 17 years with the RLPO he held a variety of posts, founded the orchestra’s education department, and administered a series of contemporary music seminars devoted to Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Ghoer, William Matthias and Edward Cowie. At Bournemouth his responsibilities have included managing the orchestra’s contemporary music ensemble, Kokoro, the RPS/PRSF Composer-in-the House residency with Stephen McNeff, and the BSO/J.P. Morgan Children’s Composer project in Bournemouth schools with Paul Rissmann.
During the 1980s he was a member of the Arts Council’s music panel and chair of its Contemporary Music Network Committee and he is a trustee of the Bliss and Finzi Trusts.
Festivals have also been a thread running through his career. With the RLPO he organised two community festivals (the Hope Street Festivals) and also while in Liverpool he administered a contemporary music festival to coincide with the opening of Tate Liverpool (Upbeat to the Tate 88). Under the auspices of the Finzi Trust he was the joint artistic director of the four triennial Weekends of English Music, and in 1993 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Chester Summer Music Festival, a post he held for 15 years during which he programmed residencies with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Nicholas Maw and James Macmillan.
His specialist field is British music of the last and present centuries. As a writer, broadcaster and lecturer he has had articles published in The Musical Times and Tempo, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, written liner notes for over 100 CDs for companies including EMI, Naxos, Hyperion, Chandos and Decca, and given talks at festivals like Three Choirs, at the South Bank, as well as in the USA at the Juilliard School of Music, Boston Public Library and the University of Tempe, Arizona. Last year he participated in one of the Proms Plus pre-concert talks. He contributed several entries to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary, for example on Nicholas Maw, Anthony Powers and Dominic Muldowney and has also written the entry on Bliss for the New Dictionary of National Biography.