Denis Vaughan
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Denis Vaughan (born 1926 in Melbourne, Australia) is an orchestral conductor most famous for his role as the driving force behind the creation of the United Kingdom's National Lottery. He is a campaigner for wider access to arts and culture for young people, and promotes the health benefits of music, the arts and sport. He is president of CAARE (Council for the Advancement of Arts, Recreation & Education), the charity he founded in 1996.
Vaughan graduated from Melbourne University as a Bachelor of Music in 1947. He won a scholarship to study organ and double bass at England’s Royal College of Music, under the tutelage of George Thalben-Ball and Eugene Cruft.
In 1950, he joined the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and went on tour to the United States with Sir Thomas Beecham. By 1954 he was assistant conductor and chorus master, in which capacity he formed the Beecham Choral Society. This was followed by engagements at La Scala, Hamburg and Munich opera houses and a season at Bayreuth as assistant to Hans Knappertsbusch. In 1959, together with Klemperer, Celibidache, Bernstein and Maazel, Vaughan was invited to conduct one of the special concerts performed in Parma in honour of Arturo Toscanini.
By 1966, Vaughan had received worldwide acclaim for his recordings for RCA Victor. His discography with the Orchestra of Naples includes the complete symphonies of Schubert, twelve Haydn symphonies, works by Schubert, Bach and Mozart, including eleven early symphonies and the opera Il rè pastore (with Lucia Popp, Reri Grist, and Luigi Alva).
He moved to London in 1987 and began a campaign to establish a National Lottery in the UK, with the aim of increasing access to culture and sport for all young people, and therefore improving the daily quality of life of the nation. Following his 1988 Sunday Telegraph article "Why not gamble on culture?", Ken Hargreaves MP presented an early day motion in the House of Commons in April 1989 calling for an Arts/Sports Lottery. It received 67 all-party signatures.
Less than a year later, the Adam Smith Institute invited Vaughan to write a paper entitled "The Case for a National Arts Lottery". Articles were also featured in the House Magazine and The Times, and Vaughan delivered an address to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Sport and Leisure Conference. In January 1992, Vaughan advised Sir Ivan Lawrence QC, who led a debate in the House of Commons, and a year later the Commons approved the Lottery in a vote.
In succeeding in his campaign for a National Lottery, Vaughan had increased funds for the arts and sport sevenfold. He was described by the late Lord Howell at as "the man who brought more money to sport than anyone else in the 20th Century".
In 1996 he founded the charity CAARE to continue promoting the benefits of wider access to arts and sport, and to act as a monitor of the National Lottery’s use of funds in these areas. As president of CAARE he directs the charity’s work in seeking further improvements in the quality of life of young people in Britain.
Denis Vaughan is an acknowledged world authority on the manuscript scores of Verdi, Puccini and Dvořák, and continues to conduct as recently as May 2005, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall.
