Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

A life dedicated to music

Born in Hertfordshire in 1945, he received his early education as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge. He then attended Berkhamsted School and became Assistant Organist of Berkhamsted Parish Church at 14 years old.

In 1962 he studied both organ and composition at the Royal Academy of Music – organ with Arnold Richardson and composition with Richard Rodney Bennett – where subsequently, in 1975, he was appointed Professor of Organ, and a Fellow – a post he relinquished in 1992 to devote more time to his own playing and composing career.

The musical career

He was Organist and Choirmaster of St Pancras Church between 1965 and 1988 and was appointed to a similar post at Gray’s Inn in 1983, which he currently holds.

He has also been Organist of the West London Synagogue, in succession to his Academy professor Arnold Richardson, since 1973, and Director of Music since 2012, where he played their fine 1908 4-manual Harrison & Harrison organ.

He relinquished this position in late 2021.

The works of Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

Collective works and interpretations

Bowers-Broadbent’s appearance on a host of CDs, those in particular for ECM in music by Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen and Górecki, and more recently for Harmonia Mundi and Hyperion, have brought him wide recognition.

Earlier recordings, which reflect his broad musical interests as a performer, included Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas, Kodaly’s Missa Brevis, Organ Classics (a cassette of popular organ music, ‘available only in Woolworths’) and the works of Francis Routh on the Coventry Cathedral organ.

He accompanied Jessye Norman on an album of popular songs and can be heard, as an arranger, on many of the King’s Singers records (1980s).

He devoted many years of his early career to giving the first and second performances of organ music by contemporary composers.

Own compositions

Collective works and interpretations

Among his own compositions are four operas:

The Pied Piper (1972, a children’s opera)
The Seacock Bane (1982, commissioned with Arts Council funds for Cranbrook School)
The Last Man (2003, a comic opera set around a game of cricket)
The Face, a story involving drug-dealing, blackmail and of course love, performed in October 2012 in Gray’s Inn Hall (as was The Last Man in 2003)

Constantly composing, his most recent works are a choral setting of the Te Deum, and Music for Shabbat, Evening and Morning Services, according to the liturgy of the West London Synagogue.