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Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, the 14th Lord Berners, was a painter, novelist, writer of poetry and nonsense verse, and a composer of brilliant and whimsical music. He was famous for his wit and outlandish behaviour. His eccentricities marked him out as a very English Englishman, but his music was a different matter entirely. Unlike many of his contemporaries on the British musical scene, he developed a distinctly European slant to his compositions, and came to be regarded as one of the truly original composers of the early 20th century.

In spite of his ultra-establishment position as a peer of the realm, Lord Berners didn’t connect at all with the old guard in the artistic world. He found he had more in common with the wildly eccentric Sitwells who, like him, were rebelling against a conventional Victorian upbringing. Berners’ idiosyncratic ways didn’t deter some of the greatest artistic talents of the time from a desire to work with him.
In the mid 1920s, Lord Berners started to take painting much more seriously and composing fell by the wayside. But that was soon to change: with the advent of the Wall Street Crash Berners felt the need for a reliable source of income and returned to writing music.

Lord Berners wasn’t just a skilful composer and successful painter, he was also a published writer. He produced two short stories, two volumes of memoirs, a play and seven novels in which Berners himself and many of his friends are portrayed, not always in the most flattering light. Donald Macleod explores Berners’ literary endeavours and introduces music from the war-time years, including a ballet based on the legend of Cupid and Psyche and his first venture into film music.
Berners spent his life mixing with some of the most conspicuous names in the artistic world. Throughout his career he had fruitful collaborations with such luminaries as Serge Diaghilev, George Balanchine, Gertrude Stein, Sacheverell Sitwell and Constant Lambert. Donald Macleod introduces Berners’ fifth ballet, which was to be his final association with Frederick Ashton and Cecil Beaton, and the suite from his very last work – the score for the 1947 film of Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby.