Christopher Brown has been involved with singing since childhood.  He was a chorister at Westminster Abbey, later an alto choral scholar at King’s College Cambridge, and - for several years after leaving university - was a professional singer with many of the top London choirs and ensembles.  In 1976, he founded the Huntingdonshire Philharmonic, a choir and orchestra that he conducted until 1991.  During this time, he built a reputation as a conductor of wide-ranging musical sympathies.  Under Chris' direction, the 'Hunts Phil' gave performances not only of many of the standard choral works by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Elgar and others, but also a repertoire of less well-known and contemporary works, including first performances of music by Shostakovich, Richard Rodney Bennett and others.  Chris has a particular love of Bach, and since 1986, has been music director of the Dorset Bach Cantata Club.  

In 1997, Chris was appointed music director of one of Cambridge’s leader chamber choirs, the New Cambridge Singers (a 32-voice choir founded by Tim Brown in 1987).   With NCS, he has given stylish performances, with professional period instrument orchestras, of Bach’s B minor Mass, and St. John and St. Matthew Passions, although the mainstay of the choir’s repertoire is unaccompanied music from the Renaissance to the 21^st century.  This choir has commissioned a number of works from British composers, including Thomas Adés, John Webb, Jonathan Pitkin, Alicia Grant and, in 2001, a major work for choir organ by Richard Rodney Bennett, “The Glory and the Dream”.  The first commercial recording of this work, together with Britten’s “Flower Songs” and Christopher Brown’s own “Invocation”, will be released shortly by Riverrun Records.   

Christopher Brown is also a composer whose extensive background in the world of choral music, both as singer and conductor, has naturally inclined him towards vocal music and opera, and his sympathetic writing for voices has earned him an international reputation.  Nevertheless, he has also written a substantial amount of chamber and orchestral music, including works for many of this country’s leading orchestras and ensembles.  He is particularly interested in working with, and writing music for, young people and amateurs; several of his children’s operas have been successfully produced in the UK and abroad, and his choral music is performed all over the world.  He was a student of Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music and Boris Blacher in Berlin.  Since 1969 he has been a much sought-after composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music.

In 1987 and 1990, Chris directed the choral course at the  Berwang Holiday Music Course and the inaugural Bach to Bacchus Weekend.   We are therefore delighted that he will be working again with Kerry Camden for the third Berwang WINTER Music Holiday Course (19th-26th January 2008) .

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