Conductor
Howard Arman moved to Austria in 1981 and has been active there and in Germany more so than in his native England. He has specialized in choral music and opera, and in 2017, he became the director of the
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
Arman was born in 1954 in London. He studied at Trinity College of Music and had some success as a conductor in Britain before moving, making appearances with British ensembles and at festivals all over Europe. After moving to Austria,
Arman quickly experienced increasing success, conducting the choirs of several German and Austrian radio ensembles. In 1983, he took the bold step of founding, in a foreign country, a choir of his own, the
Salzburger Bach-Chor; the group prospered, and
Arman remained its conductor until 2000. With other groups, too,
Arman excelled. He was the rehearsal director for the
Tölzer Knabenchor youth choir when it recorded the Bach Mass in B minor, BWV 232, with the
Taverner Consort under
Andrew Parrott. In 1991,
Arman founded a second choir, the Innsbrucker Capellknaben. He was a prime mover in the development of the Handel Festival Orchestra in Halle, Germany, and won the Handel Music Prize there in 1996, a year in which he conducted
Handel's rare opera Tolomeo, and he returned to the festival to conduct
Handel's Admeto in 2006. Increasingly,
Arman's interests grew to include opera, Handelian and otherwise. He has had a strong association with the city of Luzern, Switzerland, conducting
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro there in 2010 and leading the
Luzerner Sinfonieorchester since 2010.
Arman has continued to lead major choral performances, including one of
Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil with the
MDR-Rundunkchor.
Arman's large recording catalog is heavy on Baroque, Classical, and Romantic choral masterpieces, and he set to work quickly after his
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks appointment, releasing several albums, including the Christmas collection
Joy to the World, in 2018. With that group, he has recorded for the BR Klassik label; earlier
Arman albums appeared on MDR, Capriccio, and other labels. By early 2021,
Arman had already issued two albums with the
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, one featuring
partsongs of Edward Elgar, the other, a reading of
Arvo Pärt's Miserere.
Arman has taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum.