Richard Hickox, the much admired British conductor, has died of a suspected heart attack after a recording session in Wales. He was 60.

For conductors a 60th birthday is a coming of age. Until then they are still learning their craft. Sadly, we will never know what musical heights Hickox would have surmounted in the coming decades. Seemingly indefatigable and bubbling with enthusiasm for everything he did, he was blessed with a boundless appetite for hard work.

He was in the midst of final rehearsals for English National Opera’s new production of Riders to the Sea by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer whose music he did so much to revive. The show will open on Thursday conducted by Edward Gardner. A consummate professional to his baton tip, Hickox would have expected nothing else.

This year I watched Hickox conduct what was, in every sense, the performance of his life. It was another Vaughan Williams opera – The Pilgrim’s Progress, presented in Sadler’s Wells Theatre to a mesmerised audience. Bunyan’s morality tale was expertly and idiomatically interpreted, but there was a special quality to the performance that went well beyond that.

It seemed to epitomise all of Hickox’s finest qualities: his instinctive rapport with singers, both professional and amateur; his impassioned championing of 20th-century British music; his masterly but never overbearing way of marshalling large forces; but most of all his essential decency, generosity, humanity and sense of spirituality.

Urbane, reticent and very English in demeanour, with a slight stammer at times, Hickox embodied the saying that “still waters run deep”. And just as Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim finds peace and contentment after years of setbacks and sneers, so it seemed that Hickox was finally winning the unstinting critical acclaim that he had long deserved but not always been granted.

Perhaps fame came too early and too easily. At 25, barely out of Cambridge (where he was an organ scholar at Queens’ College), he had already founded his own orchestra and chorus and become the youngest person to conduct at the Proms. Inevitably there was a backlash against this young, affluent upstart. For some years he was generally regarded by critics and orchestras alike as competent but a little dull.

However, by sheer hard work, organisational genius, unflagging courtesy, increasing interpretative boldness and genuine niceness, Hickox hauled himself to the forefront of the musical world. Choruses loved him; and he became a superb interpreter of choral masterpieces. One of the best things I ever heard him conduct was a performance of Britten’s War Requiem with the National Youth Orchestra in St Paul’s Cathedral last year, in which he inspired 180 teenagers to evoke all the horror and pity of Wilfred Owen’s poetry.

And by the time he died – after recording Holst’s Choral Symphony – his range was enormous. He made more than 300 recordings and conducted hundreds of concerts each year, varying from Renaissance and Baroque music to scores on which the ink was still wet. Appointed music director of Opera Australia in 2005 (where he has apparently had a galvanising effect on standards and morale), he still kept up a frantic schedule in Britain. This year he conducted an entire cycle of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies in London and across the country.

However, he was probably most at home, and certainly most relaxed, at the festival he founded in St Endellion, on the north coast of Cornwall. Each Easter and summer he encouraged hundreds of musicians – young and old, professional and amateur – to give spirited concerts by night, while surfing on the beaches by day. It was an apt reflection of a man who believed that music making should always be civilised and enjoyable, no matter how intense the pressure.

A life in music

— Richard Hickox, acknowledged widely as one of Britain’s most talented and versatile conductors, was born in Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire, in 1948

— He studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music in 1966 and 1967 before attending Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he was an organ scholar

— After university, he showed his ambition and breadth with the founding of the Richard Hickox Singers & Orchestra, a group whose programmes varied from the contemporary to 14th-century church music

— Hickox went on in 1971 to found the City of London Sinfonia, which has become one of London’s leading professional orchestras

— Hickox’s association with the country’s most prominent orchestras includes work as a guest conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra, an artistic directorship at the Northern Sinfonia and six years with the National Orchestra of Wales

— Internationally, he conducted leading orchestras in Tokyo, Washington, Cologne, Vienna, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia before taking up the position of musical director of Opera Australia, which he held at his death

— Along with a discography of more than 300 recordings, Hickox amassed many honours including Gramophone awards, a Classical Brit and Royal Philharmonic Society awards. He was also elected an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College

Sources: City of London Sinfonia; www.intermusica.co.uk; Naxos; agencies

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