Richard Mills (composer)


Richard John Mills , is an Australian conductor and composer. He is currently the Artistic Director of Victorian Opera, and formerly Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera and Artistic Consultant with Orchestra Victoria. He was commissioned by the Victorian State Opera to write his opera Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and by Opera Australia to write the opera Batavia.

Career

Mills was born and grew up in Toowoomba, Queensland, and went to Nudgee College in Brisbane. He studied in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and worked as a percussionist in England and for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Mills started conducting and composing in the 1980s.
In 1988, to celebrate the Australian Bicentenary, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Mills to re-orchestrate Charles Williams's Majestic Fanfare, the signature tune of ABC news and television broadcasts, in a more modern, Australian idiom.
He was engaged to conduct Opera Australia's first complete production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in the State Theatre, Melbourne, in 2013, the of the composer's birth. On 5 June 2013, he withdrew from the Opera Australia Ring cycle.

Honours

He won the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award in 1982.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1999.
He received the Green Room Award in 2001 and 2002, and the Helpmann Award in 2002 for his opera Batavia, in 2006 for his conducting of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and in 2007 for Best Musical Direction of his opera The Love of the Nightingale. He also received the Ian Potter Foundation Award for Established Composers.
Mills was Musica Viva Australia's featured composer for 2008.
In 2019 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Works

Works for the stage

APRA Awards