Michael Berkeley (29/05/1948) is a British composer and broadcaster on music. His father was the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. Michael was a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, and he frequently sang in works composed or conducted by his godfather, Benjamin Britten. Berkeley was educated at The Oratory School, an independent school in the village of Woodcote, near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. He studied composition, singing and piano at the Royal Academy of Music, but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that he concentrated on composition. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Berkeley was Composer-in-Association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales from 2000 until 2009. He also acts as Visiting Professor in Composition at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and was Artistic Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival from 1995 to 2004.
Berkeley's compositions include an oboe concerto (1977), an oratorio Or Shall We Die? (libretto by Ian McEwan) (1982), Gethsemani Fragment (1990), Twenty-One (1991), an opera Baa Baa Black Sheep (libretto by David Malouf based on the childhood of Rudyard Kipling) (1993), Secret Garden (1997) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1998). In 2000, Berkeley wrote his second opera, Jane Eyre (libretto also by David Malouf), which was premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival by Music Theatre Wales and subsequently toured around the UK. In October 2009, his chamber opera For You, again with Ian McEwan as librettist, was premiered by Music Theatre Wales. The libretto to his 2013 opera Atonement, based on the novel of the same name by Ian McEwan, will be written by Craig Raine.
He is also known as a television and radio broadcaster on music. He currently presents BBC Radio 3's Private Passions, in which celebrities are invited to choose and discuss several pieces of music. In December 1997, one of his guests was a 112-year-old Viennese percussionist called Manfred Sturmer, who told anecdotes about Brahms, Clara Schumann, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg and others so realistically that some listeners did not realise that the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by Berkeley and John Sessions. Other Sessions creations appeared on Berkeley's show in subsequent years.