Christopher Wormald

Chris Wormald is an English-based arranger, pianist, conductor, teacher, adjudicator and former professional horn player. He was named Classic FM Music Teacher of The Year at a lavish ceremony in London, presented by Leonard Bernstein’s close friend and biographer Humphrey Burton in June 2001, and prior to that was awarded the Mortimer Medal from The Worshipful Company of Musicians at the 1998 British Open Brass Band Contest in Symphony Hall Birmingham. Chris attended the May 2018 Buckingham Palace Garden Party for his services to music education over 35 years at which Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II attended for the last time, just prior to her 93rd birthday.

Chris has conducted numerous choirs, orchestras and brass bands professionally since 1983. Particular highlights in the UK include conducting his community choir for the past 12 years, the Black Dyke Band in concerts performing his own published arrangements, Brighouse & Rastrick Band, Grimethorpe Colliery Band (whilst the band was reigning National Champions of Great Britain), Eagley Band, conducting his award-winning school ensembles in the Royal Albert Hall in a dozen concerts and in the Royal Festival Hall, Symphony Hall Birmingham and Bridgewater Hall Manchester on over forty occasions. He has conducted in America on six sell-out brass band and big band tours and likewise conducted in Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Ireland and multiple times across Europe.

Chris has won numerous competitions, festivals, awards and contests as a conductor, horn player, pianist, teacher and arranger. Now into his fourth decade as a professional adjudicator, Chris has over one hundred adjudications to his credit all over the world since 1991, with the emphasis on international brass and wind band competitions since 2004. These include the Singapore Muse Festival, multiple Swiss, French, Northern Ireland, Scottish and English brass band Championships, National Eisteddfod of Wales, Brass In Concert, National Brass Band Finals, Carnegie Trust, multiple Yorkshire, London, Midlands, Scottish, South West and North West Area band contests and many others.

Chris appears numerous times in the 2020 BAFTA-winning Sky Arts television Whit Friday march contests programme in which he was not only studio interviewed but filmed at Greenfield preparing his adjudication paperwork, where adjudicates annually.

Chris has over one hundred published brass band arrangements worldwide with Obrasso (Switzerland), Kirklees Music, Wright & Round, Studio Music and EMR. His arrangements continue to be recorded by Black Dyke, Brighouse & Rastrick, Cory and leading bands in Europe and Scandinavia. Since 2018 Chris is honoured to have had dozens of his self-published SATB and piano choral arrangements bought, sung and recorded all over the world.

As an orchestral horn player, Chris made his professional London debut in the World famous Philharmonia Orchestra at the Barbican in 2003 after two decades of freelancing throughout the north of the UK.