"Pianist Matthew Mills is clearly a marvel"

- Robert Hugill, planethugill.com

"Superb playing by pianist Matthew Mills"

- American Record Review

- Alan Cooper, British Music Society

"Mills plays ... with joyful élan"

- Guy Rickards, International Piano magazine

"performs ... with virtuosity and undeniable understanding of the idiom"

For almost three decades, Matthew Mills has enjoyed a busy and diverse freelance career as a pianist, composer, and conductor. With a repertoire encompassing music from five centuries, he has performed across the UK as a soloist, chamber musician, and accompanist, in addition to establishing a reputation as a sympathetic and creative dance accompanist. As a teacher and workshop leader, several of his private students have gone on to study at top UK universities and conservatoires. 

A committed supporter of young composers and contemporary music, Matthew founded and directed a contemporary music ensemble at Royal Holloway, University of London, with whom, assisted by his own conducting students, he led workshops and performed works by student composers, as well as established twentieth-century names. He has enjoyed a long collaboration with the British composer Bernard Hughes, having given the first performance of his Bagatelles for piano and participated in the first performances of his chamber opera Dumbfounded! at the Riverside Studios, London. In 2023, his recording of Hughes’s music for solo piano was released on the Divine Art label.

Matthew studied at the Universities of Oxford and London, and at Trinity College of Music, London. His teachers have included Christopher Elton (piano), Daryl Runswick, Andrew Lovett, and Simon Holt (composition), and Gregory Rose (conducting). An award from Oxford University enabled a period of specialist study of contemporary piano repertoire with Rolf Hind, and he has appeared in masterclasses in composition with Michael Finnissy and George Benjamin, and in piano with John Lill and Rosalyn Tureck.