Biography
Toronto-born composer, music theorist, and pianist Mark Richards is currently on faculty at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, teaching courses in music theory, music history, and the music of Beethoven. At the same time, Richards is also working on two commissions to compose new works. The first is an opera on Laura Secord, the Canadian heroine of the War of 1812, to be performed by Music Niagara in a workshop in 2012 and in a fully staged version in 2013. The second is a children's opera commissioned by Toronto's Off Centre Music Salon on the story of Thumbelina, based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen.
In 2004, Richards began writing both the music and libretto of his full-length opera Hamlet, adapted from Shakespeare’s play, and worked during his summer breaks from university until completing both a piano and chamber orchestra version in 2008. Numerous excerpts were performed in Toronto and Stratford, and in 2008, the orchestral version received a workshop and public concert reading at Stratford Summer Music. For this workshop, Richards was featured in an article in The Toronto Star.
Richards' song cycle The Blackening Landscape, based on an environmental theme and for soprano, flute, cello, and piano, was premiered in March 2009 in Toronto and encored the following September at the Glenn Gould Studio with Off Centre Music Salon. Other vocal works include the song cycles Remembrances of Nature, set to poetry by William Wordsworth, and The Tiger and Other Songs on William Blake, which won first place in the Kiwanis Festival Vocal Composition Class. Richards' most recent song cycle is titled The Green Oasis, for baritone, cello, and piano, on poems from a set of the same name by the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman, which was premiered on April 24, 2010.
His choral works include The Daffodils, set to the well-known Wordsworth poem, and Bells are Ringing, which was awarded an honourable mention in the Amadeus Choir’s 2007 Christmas Carol and Chanukah Song Writing Competition. Richards’ output also includes works for orchestra, solo piano, string quartet, other chamber ensembles, and many works for children.
Richards completed a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) in Toronto in 2002, studying with Samuel Dolin and Alexander Rapoport. In 2004, Richards began graduate studies in music theory at the University of Toronto, completing a Master’s degree in 2007 with a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a Doctorate degree in 2011, for which he received a prestigious three-year Doctoral Award from SSHRC. An accomplished pianist, Richards also holds ARCT diplomas from the RCM in both piano performance and piano teaching.
In addition to his activities as a composer and music theorist, Richards has served as music director of the Inga Jarrett Memorial Concert in Toronto from 2006-2010 and as an editor, setter, and examiner of their senior theory exams with RCM Examinations .
Updated January 2012
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