One of the most popular figures in the musical world, Mo Hickox regularly conducted the major UK orchestras and appeared many times at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Bath, Cheltenham and the BBC Proms. Richard Hickox was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Jubilee Honours List in 2002 in recognition of his position at the centre of British musical life.

Richard Hickox was also one of the busiest conductors in the studio with a discography of over 300 recordings. In 2006 he received his 5th Gramophone Award – the Editor’s Choice award for his recording of Stanford sea songs on Chandos with Gerald Finley and the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales. In 2001 he was awarded Gramophone Record of the Year and Best Orchestral Disc for his recording with the London Symphony Orchestra of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.2 in the original version (which also received a Classical Brit Award). He also won a Grammy (for Peter Grimes), two Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards, the first Sir Charles Groves Award, the Evening Standard Opera Award, and the Association of British Orchestras award. He was an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge, where he was Organ Scholar, and was awarded a Doctorate of Music at Durham University in 2003.

Hickox had a long connection with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where this season he was due to conduct L'elisir d'amore and the Britten arrangement of The Beggar’s Opera. Past productions there included Paul Bunyan, Billy Budd, Tales of Hoffman, Mitridate and A Midsummer Marriage. He has also conducted Billy Budd at the Vienna State Opera, Washington Opera and in Cologne; Salome, I Capuleti e I Montecchi and Rigoletto at Los Angeles, and many productions for English National Opera. In 2004 BBC 2 televised his Turn of the Screw (Katie Mitchell production for television). He was Music Director at the Spoleto Festival in Italy for five years, where his productions included Rosenkavalier, Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Menotti’s The Consul.

Hickox’s international career saw him conduct many of the leading orchestras in Europe, Japan and North America, including most recently the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic, and Philadelphia Orchestra.

He was a regular guest with the Philharmonia Orchestra, with whom in 2008 he undertook a series of some 20 concerts, presenting the entire cycle of Vaughan Williams Symphonies at the Royal Festival Hall and across the UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the composer's death.