Richard Honner

Richard was born in London and studied at the Royal College of Music, King’s College London, and the London Opera Centre. He worked at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (1971-72), the Australian Opera (1972-77), and Scottish Opera (1977-86) as an administrator, répétiteur, and staff conductor. As a guest, he led the musical preparation of operas for English National Opera and Frankfurt Opera.

He was an official accompanist for the Sofia International Singing Competition in 1979. Following engagements as a guest conductor, he joined Scottish Ballet in 1986 and retired in 2019. During his time there, he conducted around 2,000 performances, wrote articles and programme notes, gave pre-performance talks, and collaborated with Christopher Hampson to create the scores for two ballets: Hansel and Gretel (Humperdinck) in 2013 and The Snow Queen (Rimsky-Korsakov) in 2019. Between 1990 and 1992, he conducted operas for the RSAMD (now RCS), was a regular visitor to Hong Kong for ballet and concerts between 1989 and 2008, and was a guest conductor for the San Francisco Ballet and Opera Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand.

In 2006, Richard was instrumental in setting up the collaboration between Scottish Ballet and the RSAMD (now RCS) to create the Piano for Dance course, and he still teaches the repertoire segment.