Humphrey Burton, who has died aged 94, produced, directed and presented countless high-quality programmes about music and other arts, mostly for the BBC, but also for London Weekend Television and in a freelance capacity, in a decades-long career during which he became a well-known public figure.
Responsible for shaping many aspects of arts broadcasting over the course of the second half of the 20th century, he was an eminent practitioner in what he regarded as a golden age for serious music programmes on television.
He joined the BBC in 1955 and spent three years in radio, but was more in his element when he transferred, in 1958, to television. His mentor there was the influential Huw Wheldon, who later became a senior manager at the corporation, and it was on Wheldon’s newly created Monitor, an arts programme of trailblazing significance, that Burton cut his teeth as a programme-maker.
Audiences of three million tuned in on Sunday nights for relatively esoteric topics such as pre-Raphaelite art, a Bartók string quartet in rehearsal, or profiles of the sculptors Henry Moore and Elisabeth Frink, with studio guests such as Harold Pinter, David Storey and Orson Welles. Ken Russell’s celebrated portrait of Elgar (1962), produced by Burton for the series, was among the factors that “triggered the renaissance in Elgar’s music”, as he later put it.
When in 1963 a new BBC department called Documentaries and Music was hived off from Talks under the custodianship of Wheldon, Burton followed as his second-in-command. He created a series of programmes in the Monitor mould including Master Class, under the direction of John Drummond; In Rehearsal, with one sequence involving the teenage cellist Jacqueline du Pré working with Stephen Bishop (later Kovacevich) on Beethoven’s variations on Bei Männern from Mozart’s Magic Flute; and, what he regarded as his most important and innovative series, Workshop.
The last of these was a generic title for programmes about musicians at work, a typically arresting one involving the ebullient musicologist HC Robbins Landon dissecting the development section of the first movement of Haydn’s London Symphony. While the professor was pointing out individual players and shouting over the music to demonstrate the way Haydn propels his theme from instrument to instrument, the orchestra under Charles Mackerras played on regardless of the force of nature in front of them.
Other projects of this period included a documentary of Georg Solti’s epoch-making recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which the process of setting down the tetralogy on vinyl, under the supervision of John Culshaw, was captured against the background of the Viennese location. A memorable moment of the film, contrived by the Decca team, had a trained thoroughbred racehorse enter at the precise moment Brünnhilde addresses her faithful mount Grane (“Do you know, my friend, where I am leading you?”), to the delight of the soprano Birgit Nilsson, whose mirth brings the session to a standstill.
Promoted to the post of head of music and arts in 1965, once again in the slipstream of Wheldon, now controller of programmes, Burton was responsible for an impressive body of work. For one of his earliest projects he brought in Russell once more for The Debussy Film, scripted by Melvyn Bragg. Neither Oliver Reed’s portrayal of an oversexed composer nor a groundbreaking lesbian moment appealed to Debussy’s family, who prevented the film from being distributed internationally.
A chance encounter with the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein at the premiere of his Chichester Psalms in July 1965 initiated a close working relationship, and indeed friendship (Bernstein was to play the organ at Burton’s second wedding in New York), with a figure who was to loom large in the second part of Burton’s career. Bernstein initially signed Burton up to direct films and videos of his concerts, and they subsequently made a number of documentaries together.
The BBC series The Symphonic Twilight brought Bernstein and the LSO together in the mid-1960s for a landmark sequence of concerts (including Mahler, Shostakovich, Sibelius and Stravinsky) and Burton was to film close to 300 Bernstein events for the German production company Unitel in the coming years, among them the inspirational recording of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral in 1973, recreated in Bradley Cooper’s 2023 film Maestro.
A sense of dissatisfaction with BBC policy and another chance encounter, this time with the broadcaster David Frost, caused Burton to join Frost in his 1967 bid for an ITV franchise intended to expand cultural programming. This became London Weekend Television, for which Burton acted as head of drama, arts and music (1967–69), going on to edit and present – sporting a colourful wardrobe of striped shirts and kipper ties – a new arts programme, Aquarius, whose audiences were again measured in millions.
In April 1975 Burton, yearning for the “larger canvas” offered by the BBC, returned to the corporation, soon resuming the role of head of music and arts. The BBC was what he later described as “now a very different organisation” and editorially a “hotbed of discontent”. He nevertheless succeeded in launching a new programme, Arena, and was the principal presenter of the documentary series Omnibus from (1976-78 and 1984-85).
Sensing the need for a new “big idea” in the mid-70s, he created, with the assistance of Walter Todds and Roy Tipping, what was then called BBC Young Musician of the Year (and is now BBC Young Musician). The first competition, in 1978, was won by the trombonist Michael Hext. Subsequent winners have included the oboist Nicholas Daniel, the clarinettist Emma Johnson, the violinists Jennifer Pike and Nicola Benedetti and the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Burton also fronted the competition until 1992.
He additionally produced and directed many BBC Proms, with artists including Carlo Maria Giulini and Solti, as well as, in 1982, William Walton’s 80th birthday concert and the Verdi Requiem under Claudio Abbado. He particularly distinguished himself in opera, broadcasting five Glyndebourne productions, including the Eugene Onegin directed by Graham Vick in the season that opened the new house (1994), and Boris Godunov and War and Peace from the Kirov Opera just before it became the Mariinsky in 1992.
Born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, the son of Harry (also known as Philip) Burton, assistant director of education for the county, and his wife, Kay (nee Henwood), a midwife, Humphrey was educated at the progressive school Long Dene, initially at Stoke Poges, later at Chiddingstone in Kent, and the Judd school, Tonbridge.
After studying music and history at Fitzwilliam House (later College), Cambridge, he conducted small choirs, did some continuo playing and joined the National Youth Orchestra as a percussionist (the orchestra’s formidable founder, Dame Ruth Railton, describing him as a “keen young man … but clearly no performer”). Until his entry into broadcasting he was known as Bill; his mother preferred Humphrey on the basis that “it would sound well when I was knighted”, he later recalled – an augury fulfilled in 2020.
His programmes for Aquarius included Jessye Norman’s debut on British TV, a commemorative concert on Stravinsky’s death conducted by Bernstein in the Royal Albert Hall, a concert given in the Royal Festival Hall by Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya on their departure from the Soviet Union and a profile of Elton John in his mid-20s. Aquarius, which Burton edited from 1970 to 1975, helped LWT to win seven awards at the 1975 Bafta ceremony. It also paved the way for Bragg’s South Bank Show, which presented a mix of high art and popular culture with equal success.
Arena was initially conceived as a weekly magazine slot under the editorship of Leslie Megahey (later Alan Yentob and others) covering contemporary arts and rotating between theatre, design, art and feature films. Some of the films, for example The Private Life of the Ford Cortina, and a light-hearted study of the appeal of the popular song My Way, perched precariously on the edge of the arts spectrum.
The most notable Omnibus programmes for which Burton was responsible included those on the making of the studio recording of West Side Story under Bernstein’s baton (the first time he had conducted the work), a film about Kiri Te Kanawa, relays of operas including Joan Sutherland’s farewell Die Fledermaus, and The Quest for Reginald Goodall, a portrait of the monosyllabic octogenarian conductor.
Goodall mumbled for 10 minutes until Burton had the inspiration of mentioning Benjamin Britten, with whom he had worked 40 years previously on the premiere of Peter Grimes. “Ah, dear Ben,” Goodall recalled, thereafter expanding on Britten, Wagner and his own wife, recently deceased after half a century of marriage.
In 1983 Burton was guest director of the Hollywood Bowl Summer Music festival, highlights of which included a Gershwin evening with Sarah Vaughan and Michael Tilson Thomas, and a Wagner concert including Linda Esther Gray singing the Immolation scene to 8,000.
In 1988 he took the part-time post of artistic adviser at the Barbican Centre. It was a time of organisational and leadership difficulties at the centre and Burton felt his only real creative contribution there was the month-long festival devoted to the arts of the Nordic countries, which under the title Tender Is the North brought in the young Simon Rattle to conduct the six Nielsen symphonies and reconstructed the rococo theatre at Drottningholm on the Barbican stage, with its then artistic director, Elisabeth Söderström, presiding over a candlelit evening as the cultured Queen Lovisa Ulrika.
He continued throughout the 90s with independent film projects at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and Welsh National Opera, as well as a 20-programme documentary about Yehudi Menuhin for Classic FM. In 2001, to mark his 70th birthday, Burton fulfilled the dream of a lifetime by conducting the Verdi Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall, with the Philharmonia Orchestra and a 500-strong choir.
Running for five or six hours a day, in the final weeks, to build the necessary stamina, he acquitted himself commendably on the podium. The event also marked the centenary of Verdi‘s death and raised over £75,000 for prostate cancer research (Burton himself had received pioneering brachytherapy treatment for the condition a few years before).
His 1994 biography of Bernstein was a fastidiously researched study that accounted for, without condoning, the conductor’s voraciously priapic behaviour as a product of an all-devouring persona that needed to control.
A second book, on Menuhin (2000), developed out of the radio documentaries, while a third, The Romantic Loner (2002), was a biography of Walton co-authored with Maureen Murray. Over the next couple of decades Burton became known as an entertaining lecturer on music cruises, initially on the Danube but later to venues such as St Petersburg and Cuba.
Having moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 2001, he remained active in music-making, becoming president of the Aldeburgh Music Club in 2010. His autobiography In My Own Time (2021) documents his career in typically frank style.
In 1957 he married Gretel (nee Davis), the youngest sister of the conductor Colin Davis, from whom he was later divorced. He is survived by his second wife, Christina Hansegård (nee Hellstedt), a Swedish television journalist, whom he married in 1970, and by his children.
His first child, Nicholas (later renamed Christopher), was born in 1949 from a relationship he had with a dancer. Clare and Matthew were the children from his first marriage, and Helena and Lukas from his second. He had another daughter, the broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill, with the casting director Gillian Hawser.
• Humphrey McGuire Burton, broadcaster and writer, born 25 March 1931; died 17 December 2025
