Richard Roberts, a violinist, is retired as a spalla of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Prior to his appointment to Montreal, he was an assistant Spalla of the Cleveland Orchestra, under the regency of Lorin Maazel, for eight years.
Mr. Roberts received his first violin class with the distinguished teacher Norman Carol and, at the age of seventeen, debuted as a soloist with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in the Spanish Symphony of Lalo, under the regency of Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. He then pursued his studies at Indiana University, where he studied violin with Josef Gingold and chamber music with Janos Starker and William Primrose. He later also studied in Geneva, Switzerland, with violinist Henryk Szeryng.
The artist participated in solo recitals and chamber music in Canada, South America, Australia, the United States and Europe, in addition to performances with the Minnesota, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, Edmonton, Montreal orchestras. He played the entire cycle of sonatas and partitas from Bach to Solo Violin at the Cleveland Institute of Art and was a frequent speaker at the Cleveland Orchestra series of pre-concert lectures. In Montreal, Mr. Roberts acted in several solo roles, including the recordings of the Montreal Symphony of Scheherazade and Capriccio Espagnol, by Rimsky-Korsakov, Falstaff, Elgar, and many other works. He has been a soloist for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on numerous occasions, often in rarely performed works, such as the concerts of Richard Strauss, Louis Gruenberg, Robert Schumann and many others. In 1986, Mr. Roberts presented himself in Australia as a guest of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, performing the concert nº 1 (1907) of Bela Bartok, and returned to Australia in the summer of 1991 to participate in the International Festival of Australia Chamber Music.
As a professor, Richard Roberts served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Quebec Conservatory of Music, McGill University, Domaine Forget, the Meadowmount School of Music and the National Institute of Orchestra, and taught Master Classes at Oberlin College, Indiana University, Northwestern University, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute (UCLA), at the International Academy of Flaine (France) and the University of Maryland. Mr. Roberts was a judge of the Montreal International Violin Contest in 1987, the Andrea Postacchini contest in June 2003, in Italy, and has been regularly invited to be a member of the jury of competitions around the world.