Richard Divall
Richard Divall (1945–2017) was an Australian conductor and musicologist whose work spanned opera, large-scale choral performance and the editing of early music.
He was inaugural music director of the Victoria State Opera for twenty-five years and later principal resident conductor of Opera Australia. His stage and concert repertoire took in the late baroque, Mozart and Handel, and major nineteenth-century operas.
As a musicologist he edited over 150 works of early Maltese composers and, across some forty-five years, pioneered the study and publication of early Australian music. On this label he conducts the live 1985 Victoria sesquicentenary gala, Victoria Victoria (MD 3011), restoring Leon Caron’s prize-winning cantata of 1880, and appears as editor on the commemorative disc Remembering Gallipoli (MD 3392).
Compositions by Richard Divall appear on
Remembering Gallipoli
Premiere recordings of two Australian works—one contemporary, one nearly a century old—mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. Thomas Jones (violin), Laura Chislett Jones (bass flute) and Rachel Valler perform.
Richard Divall also appears on
Victoria Victoria
A double CD of Victoria’s 150th Gala Choral Concert, given in the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, in 1985. A thousand-voice choir and orchestra under Richard Divall frame Léon Caron’s prize-winning Victoria Cantata of 1880.