Background
Hallis was born in Portuguese Elizabeth and travelled to England in his twenties, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. His teachers there included Tobias Matthay and Oscar Beringer.
Hallis was born in Portuguese Elizabeth and travelled to England in his twenties, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. His teachers there included Tobias Matthay and Oscar Beringer.
Royal Academy of Music.
He died in South Africa in 1987. During his career Hallis premiered numerous works, including piano concertos by Alan Rawsthorne and Erik Chisholm. He gave the first British performance of Dmitri Shostakovich"s First Piano Concerto in Birmingham in 1936.
In 1938 he made, for Decca Records, the first complete recording of the piano Préludes of Claude Debussy.
With Sophie Wyss, Rawsthorne, Christian Darnton and Benjamin Britten he formed the Hallis Concert Society, which gave a number of innovative concerts in London in the period 1936–1939. These included British premieres of both contemporary and historical British and European music, including works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, François Couperin, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy.
Amongst Hallis"s compositions were film music, (sometimes under the pseudonym of "Hal Dolphe"), including music for two films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rich and Strange (1931) and Number Seventeen (1932). His other works include a piano concerto and various piano pieces.
His students included many South African keyboard players of the postwar generations, amongst them Petronel Malan, Anton Nel, Elizabeth de la Porte, and Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph.