Richard Mills (composer)

Richard John Mills AM, DMus BA(Hons) Qld, (born 14 November 1949) 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 (1996) and by Opera Australia to write the opera Batavia (2001).

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 (ABC) 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.