Richard Hickox

Richard Sidney Hickox CBE (born March 5, 1948 in Stokenchurch , Buckinghamshire , † November 23, 2008 in Swansea , South Wales ) was a British conductor . He was considered a specialist in baroque operas and later also in English music.

After Hickox grew up in a musical family - his father was a pastor and leader of the local church choir, his mother a pianist - he studied organ and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London between 1966 and 1967 and initially intended a career as a church musician. In 1967 he received a scholarship at Queens' College Cambridge , where he conducted more and more and successfully completed his studies in 1970.

After graduating, he founded the Richard Hickox Singers & Orchestra and in 1971 the City of London Sinfonia . From 1982 to 1990 he was artistic director of the Northern Sinfonia , and he also worked with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. In 1990, together with Simon Standage , he founded the baroque orchestra Collegium Musicum 90, which is entirely dedicated to historical performance practice and increasingly devoted itself to English music, such as the works of Percy Grainger and Frank Bridges or the symphonies by Michael Tippett , Edmund Rubbra , Malcolm Arnold , and William Alwyn , Ralph Vaughan Williams and Max Bruch .

In 1997 he won the Grammy Award for best opera recording with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes . Since autumn 1999 he has been chief conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and from 2005 musical director of Opera Australia in Sydney . Hickox has served as a guest conductor in Japan, the USA and throughout Europe.

After recording with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hickox died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 60 in a Swansea hotel.

Web links

• Works by and about Richard Hickox in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography at Bach-cantatas.com
• Biography - National Orchestra of Wales