Biography
Simon Wills is a prolific, widely performed and broadcast composer for the stage and concert platform with a fast-growing reputation as an accessible but dramatically powerful writer of opera. He is cheerfully anti-modernist in outlook and describes his unorthodox compositional style as "a sort of benign semitonality". He is cheerfully anti-modernist in outlook and though his music contains a high degree of intellectual organisation he declines to explain it on the grounds that it is unnecessary to do so. The language is generally very direct, simple and tuneful.
The 2009/10 season saw premieres of two major commissioned orchestral works. The Tonhalleorchester Zurich gave an acclaimed first performance of his symphonic poem The Island and the Münchner Philharmoniker toured his Dante symphony, subtitled Malebolge after the ninth circle of Hell in the Divina Commedia. 2011 has been devoted to the completion of two operas, both of which will be produced in Germany and Switzerland during 2012. The Stolen Smells, a commissioned work for Norddeutsche Rundfunk, is a full-sized work with chorus and orchestra which the composer describes as a Buffa Nera. He will conduct the first run of performances in Luzern in January/March 2012, after which it transfers to Hamburg for performances and broadcast by NDR. Du Bist Da, Du Bist Fort, an experimental chamber opera for children, gets its first production in Dusseldorf at the end of the year.
Narrative and conflict are central to his work. His opera, The Secret Agent, to his own libretto, attracted widespread attention at the Feldkirch Festival in Austria: the theme was terrorism and the work ends with one of the singers suicide-bombing the audience. His dramatic setting for double chorus and soloists of Theodor Fontane's ballade Die Bruck am Tay was performed at Bad Kissingen and Feldkirch in 2004 and Moro Lasso - a song for an unseen singer received acclaim at the Cheltenham International Festival in the same year. A sextet called ...without words... was premiered in June 2009 at King's Place in London and Caliban's Boogie, a description of the monster's awakening from sleep and "crying to sleep again" was performed at the St Magnus Festival in 2010. Corpus Christi, first played in Cardiff the same year, is an account of a bout of fever in Mexico City.
His Prelude and Fugue upon Quem Pastores Laudavere is a Christmas favourite in Germany (last year it was played for the first time by the Berlin Philharmonic) and his orchestral arrangements, which he made at Claudio Abbado's request for the Emmy-winning Spitting Image Prokofiev Fantasy, are in repertoire as a ballet at Deutsche Oper am Rhein.
His work as a conductor began with the Stockholm première of a concerto that he had composed for Christian Lindberg. He now works all over the world - to date he has performed in 73 countries - and has a particular interest in the works of Haydn and the Second Viennese School. In 2007 he conducted what is believed to have been the first complete performance in Uganda of the Mozart Requiem, at Namirembe Cathedral outside Kampala and other recent travels with a baton have included the Turan Alem Orchestra in Kazakhstan, Cyprus State Orchestra, PAC in Osaka and the Ubu ensemble in London. From 2008 - 2010 he was a transatlantic commuter while heading a project to create a national philharmonic orchestra for Trinidad and Tobago.
He originally set out to be a lutenist but following catastrophic damage to one of his hands taught himself to play the trombone - the only instrument that requires no movement in the fingers. He began his career at the opera house in Palermo in Sicily. After brief spell working with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Welsh National Opera, he joined the London Symphony Orchestra as second trombone, a position he held concurrently with a principal position in the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. After fourteen years there, he turned freelance, working at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Berliner Staatsoper unter den Linden, the Teatro alla Scala, Milan Orchester der Achtiende Eeuw in Amsterdam, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Freiburger Barockorchester and all the British orchestras. A passionate advocate of contemporary music, he was a founder member of Endymion, a regular player with the London Sinfonietta and worked as a soloist and chamber musician on every continent, broadcasting on Sudwestdeutsche Rundfunk, the BBC and Radio WFMT Chicago, made over 600 commercial recordings and had many solo pieces written for him, including one, Judas Mercator, by Peter Maxwell Davies.