Richard Mills Featured Composer



Richard Mills is a vital force in Australian music. He is a sought-after guest conductor of all Australia’s major orchestras and his compositions include orchestral and choral works, opera and ballet scores, songs and chamber music.

Richard writes bold and energetic music, often informed by his passion for Australia’s literary heritage. On receiving the Ian Potter
Cultural Trust Established Composer Fellowship, Richard articulated his high regard for the poetic form:

‘The collected wisdom of a nation is specifi cally present in its poetic heritage. The magic of woven words not only provides the specifi c inspired lyric moment, but also forms part of a larger diary of sensibility, a record of the human journey through our history captured with the incantatory precision of verse.’

Richard is most renowned as an operatic composer. The Love of the Nightingale, based upon the 3,000-year-old Greek myth of Philomele, was performed in 2007 by the state opera companies of QLD, Victoria and WA in association with the Perth International Arts Festival. It was his third opera, following Victoria State Opera’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1996)
and Opera Australia’s critically acclaimed Batavia (2001).

Musica Viva’s 2008 season will feature four of Richard’s works:
The Goldner String Quartet performs his String Quartet no 1, an invigorating exploration of the intricate colours and counterpoint of the quartet form in which themes undergo continuous transformation. Richard has revised this work specifically for this tour;

Cheryl Barker, Peter Coleman-Wright and Piers Lane perform the world premiere of his song cycle, Songlines of the
Heart’s Desires, commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Richard refers to the work as ‘a theatre of memory in
which the exploration of a mature, loving relationship becomes a musical portrait of the protagonists, looking forward and
backward through the events of life with an implicit recognition of the chemistry of time on human experience’;

The Takács Quartet performs Fantasias and Capriccio (2007), a short set of three tautly constructed romantic fantasies
brimming with energy and beautifully crafted invention; and

The Jerusalem Quartet presents the world premiere of String Quartet no 3, commissioned by Musica Viva especially for the group’s tour.

Born in 1949, Richard 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. He received the Maggs Award (1982) and the Don Banks Music Fellowship (1995). He was also the Artistic Consultant of Orchestra Victoria from 2001-2007. In 1999 he was awarded an Order of Australia. Richard is currently Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera, Director of the Australian Music Project for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, a Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland.