Adolph Hallis

Adolph Hallis (4 July 1896 – 1987) was a South African pianist, composer and teacher.

Hallis was born in Port 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. He made his debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1919, and after a wide-ranging European career settled back in South Africa in 1939, where he became a teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand. 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.

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