Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

Christopher Bowers-Broadbent ranks among Europe’s foremost organists devoted to avant-garde repertoire. He entered competitive auditions as a child and secured a place as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, where daily performances of an extensive choral repertoire in the College Chapel formed part of a rigorous musical and academic curriculum delivered at King’s College School. After completing organ studies there, he continued his training at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

While enrolled at the Academy he developed a lasting dedication to contemporary composition and formed an especially close association with the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The connection originated when a BBC early-music producer first brought Pärt’s scores to his attention; Bowers-Broadbent was struck by their “power over time and space” and by the humanity that permeates the writing.

This focus prompted him to commission new pieces from Pärt, Philip Glass, Gavin Bryars, Henryk Gorecki, Stephen Montague, Robert Simpson, and Priaulx Rainer. He has documented portions of this repertory, together with additional works by Pärt and music by Satie, Milhaud, Messiaen, Handel, and Maxwell Davies, on the Harmonia Mundi and ECM Records labels.

Bowers-Broadbent has held the post of professor of organ at the Royal Academy of Music since 1976. In 1996 he proposed that Pärt revise the Berliner Mass, a score composed in the immediate aftermath of the Berlin Wall’s collapse to mark the newly won freedom of Eastern Europeans. The updated version appeared on ECM in March 2000, performed by Bowers-Broadbent with Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices.