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Born: June 2, 1929 - Edmonton, Canada
Died: September 6, 2007 - Bakersfield, California, USA |
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The Canadian-born American tenor, Richard Robinson, was born in Edmonton, Canada and moved with his family to the Los Angeles area in 1937. He studied at the Los Angeles State College (now Cal State L.A.) and the University of Southern California (USC)
Richard Robinson sang in the Roger Wagner Chorale and, along with USC classmate Marilyn Horne, became active in the innovative Evenings on the Roof concert series and its successor, Monday Evening Concerts, which premiered and performed many contemporary works in Los Angeles and at the Ojai Music Festival. In 1967, he sang at the Carmel Bach Festival.
Richard Robinson premiered Igor Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Threni and Elegy for J.F.K., and recorded many works under the composer's direction for Columbia Records. In addition to I. Stravinsky's Persephone, Canticum sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis and Noah and the Flood, he recorded works by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Gesualdo, the latter conducted by I. Stravinsky's close friend and biographer, Anton Webern.
Richard Robinson was choral supervisor for the city of Los Angeles from 1965 to 1966 and taught voice at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, from 1966 until his retirement in 1993, when he moved to Bakersfield. He had four children - three daughters and a son - all of Bakersfield. He was married to soprano Caterina Micieli, whom he met in the Roger Wagner Chorale, from 1953 until her death in 2002. Robinson died in 2007, at age 78, in Bakersfield at the home of his daughter, Frances Muchmore. The cause of death was long-standing health problems. |
