Richard Mills is deservedly one of Australia's most sought after composers and music directors. In recent years he has pursued a diverse career as a composer and a conductor, which has seen him working with a large number of the nation's music organisations.
Mills pursued his advanced musical studies under Edmund Rubbra (composition) and Gilbert Webster (percussion) at the Guildhall School of Music, London, where he won the Saltzman Prize. Throughout his career he has also been recipient of the Maggs Award (1982), the Don Banks Music Fellowship (1995), and in 1999 was awarded an Order of Australia.
Mills made his debut as an opera conductor at Opera Queensland with The Magic Flute. Now, through his work with West Australian Opera, he has a large repertoire of standard works, as well as a reputation for conducting contemporary opera and his own compositions. Victorian State Opera commissioned him to write an opera of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, which premiered in Melbourne in 1996. Opera Australia commissioned his second opera Batavia, which was premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 2001 to great critical acclaim. Batavia consequently received a number of Green Room and Helpmann Awards including Best Opera at both ceremonies and Best New Australian Work. In 2006 his performance of Tristan and Isolde at the Queensland Music Festival won Best Classical Concert Helpmann Award.
His own music has found wide acceptance and popularity with musicians and the concert-going public, and his works are regularly performed through out the world. Compositions range from Concerto for Violin and Viola, Flute Concerto commissioned by James Galway, Earth Poem-Sky for Aboriginal Dancers, Singers, electronic sound and the Darwin Symphony, music for the ballet Snugglepot and Cuddlepie premiered by The Australian Ballet, and Fantastic Pantomimes written for the Melbourne Symphony’s tour of Japan. Recent commissions for the Sydney Symphony include Tenebrae, Emblems premiered in 2000, and Totemic Journeys to celebrate Australia’s Centenary of Federation. Requiem Diptych was commissioned and premiered by the Chicago Chamber Musicians Brass in 2001.
His CD recording Richard Mills Orchestral Works with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra has become a best seller on the ABC Classics label. In 1992 his three volume CD of the film music of Franz Waxman with the same orchestra was awarded a Deutsche Schallplattern Kritiks Preis in 1992.
Richard Mills continues a high level of involvement in the community through such projects as commissions for the 1982 Commonwealth Games, the 2000 Olympic Games, and the Australian Bicentenary re-orchestration of Charles Williams’ Majestic Fanfare (the ABC news theme). As an academic he has been Lecturer in Composition and conducting at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and Visiting Fellow, University of Melbourne School of Music.
Currently, Richard Mills works as Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera, a post held since 1997, and he has recently taken up the post of Artistic Consultant with Orchestra Victoria. In addition to these jobs, he works as a freelance artist throughout Australian and overseas.
