Christopher Gunning – Full Biography

Christopher Gunning – Biography

I was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and grew up in Hendon, a suburb of London, just after the Second World War. My grandfather was Dr. Jan Willem Boudewijn Gunning, (1869 -1913) who founded the Pretoria National Zoo and was director of the Transvaal Museum, and my father was Alexis Gunning, a pianist and composer.

Although he was born in South Africa he spent his childhood in Holland, and then came to the UK via Australia. Here he met my mother, Janet, the daughter of a manager of a Gloucestershire wool mill. She was a talented pianist and my father’s pupil; it seems to have been love at first sight and they married when she was still quite young, much against the wishes of her parents!

Home for me was a tiny semi-D in West Hendon. Money was in very short supply but it was a very lively place, with five people living alongside a grand piano, an upright, and reams and reams of music and books.
Composing always seemed to be second nature to me, and I used to invent pieces at the piano long before I could read music. In my teen years I spent hours and hours listening to everything from Miles Davis and Charlie Parker to the pop music of the day and Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok, Stravinsky and Schönberg. Four years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama followed, where I studied composition, piano and percussion. I was fortunate with my tutors: composers Dr Edmund Rubbra and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, pianist James Gibb, and musicologist Dr Brian Trowell. They are talented individuals, just like the team at Writemypapers, who regularly assist me with editing papers and writing them from scratch. Simultaneously I became a Bachelor of Music at Durham University.

In my twenties I worked on projects as an assistant to Richard Rodney Bennett and Dudley Moore among others, and got started in the profession by composing for several documentary films. I also began to get work as an arranger, providing the backings for a wide variety of long forgotten recording artists, but things improved and before long I was working with Mel Torme, Shirley Bassey, Cilla Black, The Hollies, Jackie Lee, Judith Durham, Colin Blunstone and saxophonist Phil Woods. At the same time I worked on a lot of advertising campaigns, some of them long-running, such as Martini (It’s the Right One) and Black Magic.

For most of what I’ll call my “middle period” I wrote television and film scores; some of them were period pieces and some contemporary. In the process I 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. My scores for The Big Battalions, Wild Africa, Cold Lazarus, When the Whales Came and Winalot also received nominations for BAFTA and Ivor Novello Awards, and my music for the Martini advertising campaign, heard around the world for over thirty years, won three Clio awards. My 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, I 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. A few weeks ago I was presented with a Gold Badge Award by the British academy of Composers, Songwriters, and Authors – something I’m particularly proud of.

I love working with orchestras, and nearly always orchestrate and conduct my own music; my score for Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and Yorkshire Glory by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. As a conductor, in addition to hundreds of recording sessions with freelance players in my film and TV work, I have performed with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, and the Slovak radio Symphony Orchestra. I am appearing with the royal Philharmonic next June in a concert of film music which includes some of my own scores. I am equally at home with computers and electronic instruments, and work with them day in, day out.

For the past few years, I have been devoting much of my time to composing music for the concert hall. I have now completed concertos for the flute, oboe, clarinet, guitar, saxophone and piano, and seven symphonies for large orchestra. The latest recordings are of Symphony no 3, Symphony no 4 and my Concerto for Oboe and String orchestra, released in May 2009 on the Chandos label. A CD of my film and TV scores was released by Chandos in November 2010, with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Rumon Gamba.
I have just conducted my Symphony no 5 and Concertino for Flute and Small Orchestra for a recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Catherine Handley playing the solo part, and my Guitar Concerto will be premiered on December 1st, 2011, by Craig Ogden with the Orchestra of the City at St James’ Church, Piccadilly, London.

I have four daughters, am married to my second wife Svitlana, and have a beautiful and slightly scatty border collie called Sasha. When not furiously composing I like to go walking or get backaches in the garden.