Peter Walls – Music Director and Conductor
Peter Walls is the Music Director and Principal Conductor of Opus Orchestra.
Peter has had a lifelong engagement with Baroque repertoire both as a performer and scholar. He played Baroque violin in the Academy of Ancient Music and other ensembles in the U.K. in the 1970s and was Music Director of The Baroque Players for many years and of The Tudor Consort from 1993 until 1999. His CD with that choir of motets by Peter Philips was listed by Neue Musikzeitung as one of the top early music recordings of 2002 and received a CHOC award from Le Monde de la Musique (the highest award from one of the leading French magazines for Classical music). Classics Today wrote “Conductor Peter Walls understands the overall period style and he obviously cares a lot about ensemble balance and uniformity of tone and colour.” He has published extensively on 17th and 18th-century performance practice. His book Music in the English Courtly Masque received an award from the British Academy while another book History, Imagination and the Performance of Music resulted from Lectures that he gave at Magdalen College Oxford in 2000. In 2014 he was invited to give classes on Italian Baroque performance in the historical performance programme at the Juilliard School.
Among the operas he has conducted are Handel’s Semele (for NZ Opera), Imeneo, John Eccles’s Semele (the first setting of the libretto adapted for Handel), Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, Magic Flute, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Paride ed Elena, Verdi’s Nabucco and La Traviata, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermour and Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi (for Southern Opera in 2009 and Opera Whanganui in 1994). He has conducted many premieres of New Zealand works, including Ross Harris’s Tanz der Schwāne (1993) and Jack Body’s Alley (for the 1998 International Festivals of the Arts). Peter has directed “Close Encounters” programmes with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and been Music Director of Opus Orchestra since 2004.
Peter was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Music in New Zealand in 2012. He was also awarded the Silver Medal for Merit Gloria Artis by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2011) and the Lilburn Trust Citation for Outstanding Services to New Zealand Music in 1998. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington.