German conductor Caspar Richter died on Thursday 2 February 2023 at the age of 78. During his career he worked closely with the Brno City Theatre and was at the beginning of its Music Stage. He was also a guest conductor at the Brno Philharmonic.
Caspar Richter (16 September 1944 – 2 February 2023) was born in Lübeck, Germany. At the age of five, he began to learn the piano and was a soprano in the boys’ choir. From the age of 16 he studied the organ. He graduated from grammar school with a major in humanities and a concentration in ancient languages. He also worked as a school organist and as a bar pianist in a dance café in Travemünde.
After studying conducting, piano, and composition at the Music Academy in Hamburg, he worked from 1970 as an accompanist and assistant to Lorin Maazel at the Berlin Opera, where he later – as a conductor – performed various works of the opera and operetta repertoire, especially a number of unknown works by Jacques Offenbach, of whom he was also a great connoisseur. He collaborated with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestras of Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Hamburg. At the same time he was music director of the RIAS Youth Symphony Orchestra. In 1975 he was awarded the Kurt Magnus Prize for contemporary programming. From 1978 to 1981 he was music director of the Berliner Festspiele. In 1982 he gave the first German performance of Bernstein’s Mass in Berlin. From the same year he worked at the State Opera in Vienna, was chief conductor of the Vienna Volksoper, and guest conductor at the operas in Paris, Dresden, and Basel.
In the summer of 1987 he was the musical director of the celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin. In the same year he became a founding member and musical director of the production company Vereinigte Bühnen Wien, which built large entertainment and musical orchestras for three theatres – Theater an der Wien, Raimund Theater, and Ronacher. Here, as chief conductor, he scored and conducted a number of major musicals – many of them world premieres: A Chorus Line, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Elisabeth, Beauty and the Beast, Mozart!, Jekyll and Hyde, Chicago, Wake-up, Romeo and Juliet, Rebecca, The Producers, and Dance of the Vampires.
As a conductor, however, he was well known not only to foreign audiences, but also to Brno audiences – as a guest conductor of the Brno Philharmonic, where he was temporarily chief conductor and since 2002 served as honorary conductor. In 1997 he conducted the Czech premiere of Bernstein’s Mass in Prague at Prague Castle, directed by Stanislav Moš. He was also a guest conductor at the Prague State Opera and the Janáček Opera in Brno. Since 2010 he was the music director of the National Theatre Opera Brno. During this time he performed Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Haydn’s The Creation, Offenbach’s Pericles, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Strauss’s Elektra and Antonín Dvořák’s Stabat Mater concert at the Smetana Festival in Litomyšl.
In 2006 he was awarded the Premio internazionale dell’Operetta in Italy. Two years later he was awarded the Honorary Gold Order of the State of Vienna. He was also awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art 1st Class of the Republic of Austria. He also had many award-winning CDs to his credit.
He first collaborated with the Brno Municipal Theatre as the author of the musical score in 2004 for the production of The Merry Widow. He then participated as a conductor in the concert version of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (2008), followed by the musical titles Mozart! (2009), Jekyll and Hyde (2011), Funny Girl (2012), Cats (2013) and Jane Eyre (2021). He also contributed to the preparation of the music for the Christmas Concert (2020).
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