Richard Alan Bonynge,
CBE AO (born 29 September 1930) is an
Australian
conductor and pianist.
Bonynge
(pronounced ) was born in Sydney
and educated
at Sydney Boys High School
before studying piano at the Royal College of
Music
in London. He gave up his music scholarship,
continuing his private piano studies, and became a
coach for singers. One of these was
Joan Sutherland, whom he had accompanied in
Australia. They soon married and became a duo, first (until 1962)
doing
recitals. When the current conductor
for a recital of operatic arias became ill, Bonynge stepped in and,
from that time on, he conducted virtually all of his wife's
performances.
His debut
as staged opera conductor took place in 1963 in Vancouver
, where he conducted Faust. The same year, also in
Vancouver, he conducted
Norma
for the first time, starring Sutherland and
Marilyn Horne. He also conducted the
English Chamber Orchestra in many
recordings.
By doing some research and reading up on
Massenet and Italian
bel
canto composers, Richard Bonynge discovered Massenet's own
statement about his opera
Esclarmonde being his "best achievement."
This filled Bonynge with curiosity, even more because
Esclarmonde had sunken almost into total oblivion and had
hardly been performed at all since the end of the 19th century. He
obtained a tattered
vocal score of it in
Paris, and subsequently bought the full orchestral score from an
auction in New York City. Although his wife, initially, was
skeptical about it, Richard Bonynge became an enthusiast of the
work and eventually convinced her that she should perform the role
of Esclarmonde herself. And so the
San Francisco Opera and the
Metropolitan Opera premieres of it took
place in 1974 and 1976 respectively.
In 1977 he was the founding Music Director of
Vancouver Opera Orchestra (at its creation),
when he conducted
Le roi de
Lahore staged there (in which also his wife took
part).
He made his Metropolitan Opera debut on 12 December 1966, and his
last performance there was on 6 April 1991. Most of those
performances he conducted there between 1966 and 1987 were with his
wife singing. In the beginning, his speciality (until early 1970s)
was music of 18th and early 19th century, mostly in bel canto
repertoire (
Rossini,
Bellini and
Donizetti), then gradually added also
middle
Verdi (
La traviata,
Rigoletto,
Il
trovatore),
Offenbach
(
Les Contes
d'Hoffmann), then also Massenet (
Esclarmonde and
Werther). He has also recorded each
of
Tchaikovsky's three
ballets –
Swan Lake,
The Sleeping Beauty, and
The Nutcracker.
Since 2007, he conducted a series of performances in a few opera
houses around the U.S.
(Florida Grand
Opera, Michigan Opera
Theatre), and now is mostly involved with the Opera Australia company (Lucia di Lammermoor in August 2008,
and in 2006 for Opera Queensland;
I Capuleti e i
Montecchi in Melbourne
and Sydney in middle of 2009).
Honours
Richard Bonynge was made
Commander of the Order of the
British Empire (CBE) for his services to music in 1977. In
1983, he was made Officer of the
Order of Australia, and in 1989
Commandeur of the L'
Ordre national du Mérite. In
2009, Bonynge was awarded the 2009 Sir
Bernard Heinze Memorial Award.
References
External links
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