Christopher Gunning was born in 1944 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and grew up in Hendon, a suburb of London, just after the Second World War. His father was Alexis, who was born in South Africa but brought up in Holland. He was a composer and pianist, and his mother, Janet, was his piano pupil.

Home was a tiny semi-D in West Hendon. A lively place it was too - with five people crammed into it together with a grand piano, an upright, and ream upon ream of music and books.

Composing was always second nature, and Christopher would invent pieces at the piano long before he could read music. In the teen years he listened continually to everything from jazz and pop music to Bartok, Strawinski and Schonberg. Four years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama followed, and there he studied composition, piano and percussion. His tutors included composers Dr Edmund Rubbra and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, pianist James Gibb, and musicologist Dr Brian Trowell. Simultaneously he became a Bachelor of Music at Durham University.

In his twenties Christopher composed the music for several documentary films and also worked as an arranger, providing the backings for a wide variety of recording artists, including Mel Torme, Shirley Bassey, The Hollies, Colin Blunstone and saxophonist Phil Woods. At the same time he composed the music for a lot of advertising campaigns, some of them long-running, such as Martini and Black Magic.

Christopher has spent the greater part of his career writing television and film scores, which vary in character from period pieces to contemporary drama. He has won four BAFTA awards for 'La Vie en Rose,' Agatha Christie's 'Poirot', 'Middlemarch', and 'Porterhouse Blue', and three Ivor Novello Awards for 'Rebecca', 'Under Suspicion', and 'Firelight'. His scores for 'The Big Battalions', 'Wild Africa', 'Cold Lazarus', 'When the Whales Came' and 'Winalot' have also received nominations for BAFTA and Ivor Novello Awards, and his music for the 'Martini' advertising campaign, heard around the world for thirty years, has won three Clio awards. His most recent film commission was the score for "La Mome," also known as "La Vie en Rose," the feature film starring Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf and directed by Olivier Dahan. On a wonderful night in February 2008, he was presented with the BAFTA award for Best Music and on the same night, the film won 3 more BAFTA awards, including one for Marion Cotillard as 'best actress,' who went on to win an Oscar for her performance.

Christopher loves working with orchestras, and generally orchestrates and conducts his own material; his score for "Cold Lazarus" by Dennis Potter was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and "Yorkshire Glory" by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He is equally at home with computers and electronic instruments.

More recently, Christopher has been devoting much of his time to composing music for the concert hall. His output includes concertos for the oboe, clarinet, saxophone and piano, and five symphonies for large orchestra. The latest recordings are of Symphony no 3, Symphony no 4 and the Concerto for Oboe and String orchestra, released in May 2009 on the CHANDOS label.

Christopher is currently working on Symphony no 6 and a new CD of his film and TV music, to be released by CHANDOS in the autumn of 2010.

Please visit the BLOG and DISCOGRAPHY pages for more information.

April 2009