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<\/a><\/p>\nRichard was one of the first bona fide big wigs I met when I began to move a major part of my professional life to Britain. I had been introduced to David Murray, his administrative colleague at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, through my work with Leonard Slatkin at the NSO. David asked me if I\u2019d met Richard, and when I told him I\u2019d been a bit reluctant to corner him as an unknown conductor new in town. My experience with \u201cbig cheese\u201d conductors in America had been that unless someone introduces you, you\u2019re only going to annoy them as a young conductor trying to strike up a conversation. David wisely counseled me that Richard would be surprisingly approachable.<\/p>\n
With some trepidation, I waited for Richard one frosty November afternoon after a BBC NOW rehearsal. I caught him in the hallway as he left the rehearsal and quickly introduced myself and asked if he might have time for a chat.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOf course. I\u2019m not back until the New Years concert. I\u2019ve got lunch with David Murray on the 29th<\/sup>, so let\u2019s meet at 1 PM on the 30th<\/sup>.\u201d He gave me a big handshake and a smile and was off. It wasn\u2019t lost on me that he didn\u2019t need to check his calendar, or make a note of my name or the date and time we\u2019d just arranged. Over the years, I continued to marvel at his ability to manage one of the most complicated careers in the business, seemingly all in his head. He could always tell you what he was going to be rehearsing, with who and where a year on.<\/p>\n The day before I met him, I arranged to leave a CV, rep list and a short note for him, and when I saw him the next day, it quickly became clear he\u2019d read and pretty well memorized it. At the end of his morning rehearsal, we met and made our way to the BBC canteen for lunch. \u201cYour repertoire list is staggering,\u201d were virtually his first words. I was glad the list was genuine, because he quickly began to quiz me in a playful way about piece after piece on the list. He asked about my studies, and about my work at the CSO and NSO- who I knew, who I’d seen recently\u00a0and what I thought of them. Richard always wanted to know what was going on in the field- some conductors like to wear a mask of the great artist blissfully above the daily doings of something so base as the music industry, but Richard was a hard-headed and shrewd business man, who always understood that knowledge was power.<\/p>\n Over the next several months, we continued to meet up when he had time, and we gradually became friends. He took an interest in not only what I was conducting, but also who I was doing it with. When I would do a work like Beethoven 9, he\u2019d want to know the soloists- if they weren\u2019t names he knew, he\u2019d want a very frank assessment of their voices and musicianship, and he never forgot a soloist\u2019s name, especially if I said they were good. Richard himself had a sort of posse of singers and soloists he worked with that he trusted and liked- not all were huge names. He encouraged me to build my own such list, but also to get to know and work with big names whenever I could.<\/p>\n He liked to know not only what I was conducting, but how- \u201cAre you taking the repeat of the first movement? German Latin? I should hope so! Much better\u2026\u201d\u00a0 He even occasionally loaned me scores of pieces he specialized in like the Dvorak Stabat Mater: \u201cColin Davis used to do this for me, and it always helped, so do take it home and have a look,\u201d he would say. Among other things, I learned how nerve wracking it is to know you have Richard Hickox\u2019s Stabat Mater score in your house.<\/p>\n Finally, after a while, he gave me wonderful news after a BBC NOW concert in Swansea- he was naming me as the assistant conductor of the orchestra. Sadly, funding disagreements and shortages\u00a0resulted in the position being scrapped before I could start, and Richard was quite blunt about what had gone wrong, which I appreciated- it\u2019s hard to lose an opportunity, but worse if you don\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n We did finally end up working on a few one-off projects, most notably when I covered for his performance of Mahler 8 here in Cardiff. Mahler was not necessarily Richard\u2019s bag- something he confessed when telling me about the project, but he was always smart enough to surround himself with a strong team when he was stretching his own envelope. That week, BBC NOW\u2019s wonderful chorus master Adrian Partington and I put in countless hours throughout the week, as Richard managed challenges musical, personal and logistical. He worked us both hard, but that\u2019s by far the most fun way to work as an assistant- far preferable to the more common curse of sitting in the audience taking balance notes for countless hours, only for most of your efforts to be ignored. It was a week as stressful as it was monumental- soloist after soloist dropped out when confronted with Mahler\u2019s superhuman demands (and don\u2019t even get me started on a couple of the egos), while hundreds of choral singers ended up trapped on the motorway missing precious rehearsal time. Richard weathered it all without ever seeming to tire or show any doubt that it would be the triumph it had to be.<\/p>\n That project finally led to me getting engaged to conduct BBC NOW- American orchestras can be quite stingy about letting conductors \u201cgraduate\u201d from covering to conducting, but not BBC NOW. Richard was quick to check how I\u2019d done after the dates and to pass on \u201cthe good news of what they were saying after you left.\u201d I\u2019ll always be grateful to Richard for opening that door here.<\/p>\n As the years went on, we saw each other less as I became less able to get around to visit him, and his work life shifted towards Australia. Happily, I was working instead of waiting around Cardiff. Still, he always wanted to know what I was doing, and what my plan was for moving the career forward. We often saw each other just after concerts, and over the years, I met half the British musical establishment in the green rooms of Cardiff, Swansea and London with Richard. Richard understood the pecking order, and was unapologetic about leaving you in mid-sentence if there was someone more important for him to talk to, but on the other hand, he was always unfailingly generous in making sure to introduce me to agents, soloists, composers and other \u201cplayers\u201d in the business, always putting in a kind word for my work.<\/p>\n My fondest memory of Richard came far from British shores, closer to my Northwest \u00a0work territory in Seattle. I took my former conducting teacher, Gerhard Samuel, to see Richard conduct the Seattle Symphony. Richard was not really a conductor\u2019s conductor- he wasn\u2019t someone who was fastidious about technique, and, frankly, with his schedule, I don\u2019t know when he could have even thought about his technique. I mention this only because Gerhard\u2019s reaction to that concert so summed up the essential paradox of Richard\u2019s career. After the first piece, Gerhard went on one of his patented rants about Richard\u2019s technique- what he wasn\u2019t showing, all the tics and habits. However, after the Mozart Requiem which ended the program, Gerhard was deeply moved. \u201cI don\u2019t know how he does it, but it was really wonderful. So moving,\u201d said Gerhard. I feel guilty now to admit that I struggled with the same questions over the years. I think in some ways, this is the mystery of conducting- we can isolate all the things that make conducting work, but some conductors have that X-factor that lets them break all the rules and make magic happen anyway, by some mixture of inner musicianship, mojo and force of personality. I teach conductors from all over the world, and I\u2019d like to think I understand the craft as well as most, but I never quite understood how Richard \u201cdid it.\u201d Richard built a body of work that towered over that of many more natural technicians over the years, and that is what counts.<\/p>\n I took Gerhard back to meet Richard after that concert. Gerhard was already suffering from the early symptoms of Alzheimer\u2019s- he was an aging\u00a0genius who could then repeat himself quite easily and often, and was increasingly frail and vulnerable. I was more than a little nervous about how the two men would get on- Gerhard never had much of an edit button. When I introduced Gerhard to Richard, I saw the best of the man. Richard, the consummate power player, spoke to this retired and vulnerable older colleague as though Gerhard were the one who had just had the triumph in Benaroya Hall, as if Gerhard were his teacher, not mine. Gerhard was really touched, but not so much as I was.<\/p>\n Gerhard passed away as a very old man this past spring. How cruel that Richard, the tireless, indestructible Richard Hickox, would only survive him, or his friend and sometime mentor Vernon Handley, by a few months.<\/p>\n I wanted to focus on my friendship with Richard in this post, as it is the friend\u2019s loss I\u2019m most aware of today. However, it seems wrong to finish without some discussion of his musical legacy. Friendships between conductors always carry with them the challenge of surviving the strength of our own opinions- over the coming days, I\u2019ll be feeling a fair bit of guilt over every tempo I ever complained to a friend about. I didn\u2019t always see eye to eye with Richard about music, and in some repertoire he could drive me nutty. However, over the years, I saw him do an astonishing range of repertoire.<\/p>\n He\u2019ll be most remembered as a champion of British music- he and I had nearly opposite instincts in Elgar, a composer we both adored, but I really liked his Vaughan Williams. I don\u2019t particularly warm to the London Symphony, let alone the uncut version of it, but Richard was one hell of an advocate for it. I LOVED his way with Tippett, a composer I\u2019d admired but never loved before. His performance of The Rose Lake with BBC NOW in Cardiff was one of the highlights of his time here (they made a marvelous recording that week for Chandos), and made a huge impression on me. The series of recordings of the music of Frank Bridge are wonderful, and important documents of neglected composer\u2019s life\u2019s work- one of many, many\u00a0such composers.<\/p>\n His discography focused most often on lesser known composers- one very standard composer he loved was Dvorak, and I remember a very lively and exciting Dvorak 2 from early in my time here, but even more so a towering performances of the Stabat Mater and his epic opera Dmitrij at the Proms. Both are wonderful works full of traps and challenges for the performers. He made them sound like masterpieces. For someone who did an astonishing range of works, many of which he did once or twice in a long and busy career, it was inspiring to see what he could do with a piece he\u2019d lived with and re-worked and re-studied over and over. That Mozart Requiem in Seattle, conducted from memory and in complete command of every detail showed him at his best. Most conductors don\u2019t have the balls to go beyond their handful of party pieces- Richard had his party pieces, but it is a credit to his legacy that people won\u2019t be remembering him as one of those guys who always do Tchaik 4 when they guest conduct. Instead, he\u2019ll be remembered as a champion of the composers who still needed a bit help to get their music heard properly.\u00a0Feeble as it sounds, my thoughts are with his wife Pamela and the rest of his family.<\/p>\n More from-<\/p>\n On An Overgrown Path<\/a><\/p>\n The Telegraph<\/a>\u00a0and more from The Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n The Times<\/a><\/p>\n The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0and more from The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n The Independent<\/a><\/p>\n UPDATE-<\/p>\n More coverage from<\/p>\n Jessica Duchen<\/a><\/p>\n