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. ~ James Manheim, Rovi