[1] He began pursuing tonal composition and reinvestigating more traditional forms such as requiems, church chorales and brass band music.
Burstein has also suggested that this style of music can be composed by musicians (such as himself) "who were fired in the white heat of the atonal avant-garde and who dedicated themselves to that depth of knowledge and practise within the most highly-charged furnaces of experiment".
[5][6][7] He is associated with the Stop The War Coalition, giving press conferences with Bianca Jagger and Walter Wolfgang and performing benefits alongside Julie Christie and Michael Nyman.
They also played in the Hallé Orchestra, Manchester (during which time Samuel Burston had enjoyed a close rapport with the conductor Sir John Barbirolli.)
However, he has also noted that his Jewish ancestry perhaps formed a "subliminal linkage" to his decision to compose the Holocaust-themed choral work The Year’s Midnight in 2000.
Burstein has commented that at the time of his studies there was widespread talk of a "malaise", or "vacuum" in contemporary classical music, but that there were no simultaneous ideas regarding how this problem might be solved.
This ensemble existed between 1983 and 1993 and performed works by Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistle, Edward Elgar, Brian Ferneyhough, Oliver Knussen, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Luciano Berio among others.
However, Burstein's priorities were beginning to alter due to his growing interest as a composer in reassessing and reincorporating tonality into contemporary music.
Although the Grosvenor Group performed three of Burstein's compositions during its lifetime, these were atonal works inspired by his education at the Royal College of Music.
Burstein continued to compose for varied groups of musicians, covering ensemble pieces, choral and solo vocal music and large-scale orchestral works.
The former was described by The Independent Magazine as "messianic, mystical, visionary... a spectacularly doomy piece for massed brass, all heart – bursting chords and cascading scales",[full citation needed] while What's On Magazine drew attention to the "axis of largely consonant harmonies, lifting stray phrases high above the main architecture.
"[full citation needed] The Guardian, by contrast, found that Eternal City made "all the intellectual demands of Mills and Boon pulp fiction; it deals in emotional commonplaces.
The composition was described by The Sunday Times as being "nothing short of alchemy"[full citation needed] and by the London Evening Standard as being "dignified and beautiful.
In a 3 June 1997 article announcing the premiere of A Live Flame, The Times described Burstein as a "composer who used to organise bands of hecklers to go about wrecking performances of modern atonal music, particularly anything by Sir Harrison Birtwhistle."
In consequence, Burstein composed a work covering the story of the martyrdom of the church's patron saint – Alfege (for orchestra and choir plus soprano/tenor/bass soloists) was first performed in 2000.
Commissioned and performed by the Zemel Choir, this work was premiered at St John's, Smith Square, London in 2000[13] (and broadcast the following year on BBC Radio 4 as part of their Holocaust Memorial Day).
1: Dance Of Death/Dream Of Love was premiered and commissioned by the Bochmann String Quartet (funded by the Jewish Musical Institute)[14] at the Bridewell Theatre in London, March 2002.
Songs Against War (settings of poems by Keith Douglas, Wilfred Owen, Lemn Sissay and Ben Okri, performed by mezzo-soprano soloist and piano) was premiered at the Cockpit Theatre in London in October 2001.
Its central plot element dealt with the plight, motivations and fate of several Palestinians drawn into the world of suicide bombing tactics, which they ultimately rejected in favour of a wounded yet hopeful peace with their neighbours.
Manifest Destiny gained a great deal of press attention due to its topical and controversial subject matter, including scenes showing the preparations for a suicide bomb raid and the incarceration and maltreatment of one protagonist in Camp X-Ray (a scene written prior to public knowledge of the events at Abu Ghraib.
In an interview with a Canadian radio station, Burstein describes the core of the opera as being "one in which despair miraculously turns into hope, violence into compassion, hatred into respect.
Scotland on Sunday described Manifest Destiny as " a dazzling, dark opera... affecting, bold, potent and packed with melodic invention" and praised it for marrying "the personal with the political, the particular and the universal.".
[15] The Daily Telegraph, while describing the libretto as "stilted", and the political message as "banal and fatally one-sided", also noted its "rigorous and high-minded" nature with a story "in the environs of Greek tragedy".
[17] More negative reviews came from Anna Picard in The Independent who criticised the "narrowness of its harmonic language and the robotic word-setting" and likened it to "sixth-form satire",[18] and Veronica Lee in the London Evening Standard who described the libretto as "horribly leaden and unmusical" and the music as "uninspiring", adding, "the idea that there is anything heroic about suicide bombers is, frankly, a grievous insult.
[21] The Evening Standard case inspired a subsequent play – The Trainer, written by David Wilson and Anne Aylor (with co-writes by Burstein).
Premiered at Oxford House, London, in March 2009, and subsequently at the Hackney Empire, the play is a fictionalised version of the events of the trial, in parallel with a separate plot strand echoing that of Manifest Destiny.
Actors involved in the production included Corin Redgrave and Tim Pigott-Smith who played Burstein, Janie Dee and Roger Lloyd-Pack.