Richard Bonynge BiographyRichard Bonynge, conductor Born in Sydney, Richard Bonynge studied at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. He served as Musical Director of the Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Company in 1965 in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane, was Artistic Director of the Vancouver Opera from 1974 to 1977 and Musical Director of The Australian Opera from 1976 to 1986. In 1977 he was awarded the CBE and the Order of Australia, and in 1989 was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in Paris. He married the soprano Joan Sutherland in 1954. Richard Bonynge is acknowledged as a scholar of bel canto opera, nineteenth-century French opera and nineteenth-century ballet music.
He has conducted at most of the world's opera houses, in Great Britain, in the United States, Canada, Argentina, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. His repertoire consists mainly of eighteenth-century opera, the great bel canto repertoire, French nineteenth-century opera, nineteenth-century ballet and opera, the operas of Mozart and Handel, and many operettas. He has been responsible for the revival of many operas which were not at the time included in the repertoire, including Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, Rossini's Semiramide and Sigismondo, Donizetti's La fille du régiment, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena and Lucrezia Borgia, Massenet's Esclarmonde, Le Roi de Lahore and Thérèse, Pacini's Medea, Haydn's Orfeo, and Verdi's I Masnadieri. Richard Bonynge has recorded over fifty complete operas as well as the three great Tchaikovsky ballets, three Delibes ballets and countless relatively unknown ballets of Adam, Minkus, Burgmüller, Auber, Drigo, and Offenbach. He has also made videos of Les Huguenots, La fille du régiment, Adriana Lecouvreur, Die lustige Witwe, Les dialogues des Carmélites, Norma, Die Fledermaus, Lucrezia Borgia, Lucia di Lammermoor, Lakmé, Il trovatore, Die Zauberflöte, and Die Csárdásfürstin.
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