Richard Hickox was one of the most talented, successful and popular conductors of his generation with boundless energy and a gift for inspiring the musicians he worked with to produce often brilliant performances.

He had a vast repertory, ranging from Baroque opera to modern symphonic music, and was a prolific recording artist. He was a tireless promoter of 20th-century British music, rescuing from deepening obscurity not only the work of mainstream symphonists such as Rubbra and Alwyn but also curiosities such George Dyson’s large-scale cantatas The Canterbury Pilgrims and Quo Vadis and Lennox Berkeley’s two one-act operas, Ruth and A Dinner Engagement.

He gave more than 100 first performances, made more than 300 recordings and, after a five-year stint as principal guest conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra during the 1980s, conducted many of the leading orchestras in Europe, Japan and North America, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Orchestre de Paris and the New York Philharmonic. He regularly conducted the leading British orchestras, notably the LSO, Philharmonia, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and appeared many times at the main British festivals such as Aldeburgh, Bath, Cheltenham and the BBC Proms.

Vaughan Williams was a special love. For Chandos he set down a complete symphony cycle which, with the special permission of the composer’s widow, Ursula, included the premiere recording of the original version of the London Symphony. It went on to win the 2001 Gramophone Record of the Year award. Other VW rarities he introduced included A Cotswold Romance, The Death of Tintagiles and the composer’s “problem opera”, The Poisoned Kiss, which he recorded along with the more familiar The Pilgrim’s Progress and Sir John in Love. This Thursday he was due to conduct a new production of Riders to the Sea for English National Opera. It will now be dedicated to his memory.

With Collegium Musicum 90, a period instrument orchestra that he co-founded in 1990 with the violinist Simon Standage, he indulged his love of Baroque and Classical music, and in addition to popular works such as Messiah and Dido and Aeneas he explored with characteristic enthusiasm the masses of Haydn, Schubert and Hummel as well as operas by Vivaldi and Handel.

Richard Sidney Hickox was born in Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire, in 1948. His mother was a piano teacher and his father a clergyman who would take him to church in Wooburn every Saturday “and plonk me on the organ stool while he got ready for Sunday services”, Hickox recalled. “He soon realised I was desperate to play . . . As soon as my feet could touch the pedals I had lessons. My ambition was to be a cathedral organist. By the age of 7 I was playing for church services.”

Hickox first stepped on to the conductor’s podium at 16, having persuaded his father that he was competent enough to be choirmaster of the church choir. “I wasn’t nervous — probably cocksure to be honest. I had iron determination. I put my life and soul into that choir for three years.”

Hickox was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music for a year before going up to Queens’ College, Cambridge, as organ scholar. In 1971 he formed both the City of London Sinfonia and the Richard Hickox Singers and made his professional conducting debut at St John’s, Smith Square, in the same year. His reputation as a talented choral director was soon recognised, and appointments as director of the London Symphony Chorus from 1976, the Bradford Festival Choral Society from 1978 and, from 1972 to 1982, as organist and Master of Music at St Margaret’s Westminster, duly followed. During this period he was also appointed artistic director to several festivals, including, in 1974, Spitalfields Festival in London.

During the 1980s he deepened his experience of the orchestral world with eight years as artistic director of the Northern Sinfonia and the associate conductorship of the LSO. Opera assumed greater importance and he made his ENO debut in 1979 and his Covent Garden debut (with Die Zauberflöte) in 1985, the same year in which he conducted Handel’s Alcina at Spitalfields and Orlando for Scottish Opera. At Covent Garden he conducted Paul Bunyan, Billy Budd, Les contes d’Hoffmann, Orfeo ed Euridice, Mitridate and The Midsummer Marriage, while for Opera North he was a powerful ambassador for Walton’s much maligned Troilus and Cressida, an account of the opera which formed the climax to Chandos’s complete recorded Walton edition.

Abroad, Hickcox conducted opera in Vienna, Cologne, Washington and especially Los Angeles, where after his debut with Alcina in 1986 he conducted Salome, I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Rigoletto. From 1997 to 2002 he was music director of the Spoleto Opera Festival where he conducted Rosenkavalier, Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Menotti’s The Consul. Since January 2005 he had been music director of Opera Australia in Sydney.

As well as being appointed CBE in 2002, he received five Gramophone awards, a Grammy, two Royal Philharmonic Society Music awards, the Sir Charles Groves Award, the Evening Standard Opera Award, and the Association of British Orchestras Award.

Hickox was a force of nature, committed, enthusiastic and inspiring; a warm and generous man who was held in great affection by the musicians and singers he worked with.

He is survived by his third wife, the mezzo-soprano Pamela Helen Stephen, and his three children.

Richard Hickox, CBE, conductor, was born on March 5, 1948. He died after a suspected heart attack on November 23, 2008, aged 60