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 regarded as a specialist in baroque operas and later also for English music.

After Hickox grew up in a musically influenced parents - his father was a minister and head of the local church choir, his mother a pianist - he studied 1966-1967 organ and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London and initially planned a career as a church musician. In 1967 he received a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he conducted propagated and 1970, his studies successfully completed.

After graduation, he founded the Richard Hickox Singers & Orchestra and 1971, the City of London Sinfonia. From 1982 to 1990 he was Artistic Director of the Northern Sinfonia, in addition, he worked with such orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. In 1990 he founded together with Simon Standage baroque orchestra Collegium Musicum 90, the prescribed himself entirely to historical performance practice, and increasingly devoted himself to the English music, like the works of Percy Grainger and Frank Bridges or the symphonies of Michael Tippett, Edmund Rubbra, Malcolm Arnold, 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 the autumn of 1999 he was chief conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, from 2005 musical director of Opera Australia in Sydney. As a guest conductor Hickox worked in Japan, in the U.S. and throughout Europe.

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