Organist

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CHRISTOPHER BOWERS-BROADBENT

 

Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, who was appointed Gray’s Inn’s Organist and Choirmaster in 1983, began his musical education as a chorister at King's College, Cambridge, later going on to study organ and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he became a Fellow and professor of organ in 1975.

 

An important exponent of contemporary music, he has commissioned new additions to the organ repertoire and has given first performances of works by Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars, Henryk Górecki, Philip Glass, Stephen Montague, Robert Simpson, and Priaulx Rainier.

 

Bowers-Broadbent has made numerous recordings (ECM, Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, etc.), including the works of Pärt, with whom he has an especially close connection, as well as music by Olivier Messiaen, James MacMillan, Steve Montague, Elgar, Howells, Routh, amongst others.                                         

 

Bowers-Broadbent gave his first major recitals in 1969 at the St Albans International Organ Festival, in 1971 at the Royal Festival Hall, and first appeared as a soloist in the Proms in 1972.    Since 1973 he has also been organist (with rare ecumenical aplomb) of the West London Synagogue, Upper Berkeley Street; only the fourth person to hold that position since the historic synagogue, home to Great Britain's first Reform congregation, opened in the 1840’s (sic).  

 

Apart from his busy playing schedule he never ceases to compose music of all genres; a recent work, 7Words (an organ solo in seven movements commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus), was further commissioned by the Estonian Chamber Choir in 2006 as a 13 movement work for Choir and Organ.  He has written three short operas, the third of which, The Last Man, was performed in Gray's Inn Hall, London, in 2003.  He is now composing on a fourth opera, to a libretto by Campaspe Lloyd-Jacob, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, which he hopes to complete in 2009.    

 

 

GRAY'S INN CHAPEL ORGAN                       organ4.jpg

 

Following  bomb damage, the Chapel at Gray's Inn was rebuilt after the war and a new instrument  was provided which employed electric action with a detached console, part of the organ being on a shelf on the north side of the chancel and the rest in a chamber speaking through a grille also on the north side. 

 

The instrument had started to become a little less reliable and had musical shortcomings which the Inn organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, was finding restricting in the development of the chapel music.

 

The new organ, completed in the spring of 1993, was designed to be as flexible as possible - given the constraints of space with particular reference to the requirement of contemporary music. 

 

The casework was designed to be in keeping with the style of the post-war interior of the Chapel and is of stained North American hard Maple.