Richard Mills
Richard Mills composes opera, song and solo instrumental music with a practical lyric ear. His Judith Wright cycle Woman to Man and his Pastoral and Six Preludes for solo oboe give singers and players clear lines and room to breathe.
Woman to Man, written for mezzo and piano, sets six Wright poems with direct, singable intensity. The Six Preludes and Pastoral for solo oboe have become recital and examination staples, full of character without empty display. He has also arranged carols for orchestra, among them Carol of the Drum. Larger stage works include the operas Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Batavia, Australian stories shaped with the same sense of voice and theatre. Mills works as a conductor as well as a composer, leading and advising Australian opera companies from the podium.
Richard Mills appears on
The World is a Beautiful Place
The Australian Rosny Children’s Choir presents A Dozen of Dennis, Peter Davies’s settings of twelve poems from C. J. Dennis’s A Book for Kids, with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.