Hallis was born in Port Elizabeth, Cape Colony 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,[1] where he became a teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand.
During his career Hallis premiered numerous works, including piano concertos by Alan Rawsthorne and Erik Chisholm.
These included British premieres of both contemporary and historical British and European music, including works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, François Couperin, Arnold Cooke, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy.
[6] His students included many South African keyboard players of the postwar generations, amongst them Michael Blake, Norman Olsfanger winner of first SABC piano competition SAMRO Prize, Marcelle Mierowsky, Neville Dove, Marian Friedman, Paul Hepker, Petronel Malan, Anton Nel, Elizabeth de la Porte, Renee Reznek, and Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph.