Peter Walls is a musicologist, conductor, Baroque violinist and arts administrator. His first book, Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) won the British Academy’s Derek Allen Prize and was a Choice ‘Outstanding Academic Book of 1997’. Most of his publications focus on 17th and 18th century performance practice. These include History, Imagination and the Performance of Music (Rochester: Eastman UP, and Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002). His most recent publication is a bilingual edition of the Art of Playing on the Violin for the Geminiani Opera Omnia.

Peter is Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington, where he taught for many years (and where he was an undergraduate before completing his DPhil in Oxford). He was the Waynflete lecturer at Magdalen College Oxford in 2000 and has held Visiting Fellowships at Exeter and Magdalen Colleges, Oxford and at Clare Hall in Cambridge (where he is now a Life Member).

He is well known in New Zealand as an orchestral, operatic and choral conductor. His Naxos CD with Tudor Consort of Peter Philips motets won a CHOC award from Le Monde de la Musique and was named as one of the top early music recordings of the year in 2001 by the Neue Musikzeitung. He conducted Handel’s Semele for NZ Opera in 2020 and is the Music Director for Opus Orchestra (based in Hamilton, New Zealand).

Peter was Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra 2002-2011 and of Chamber Music New Zealand 2015-2018. He serves as a board member on a number of charitable trusts, including the Chamber Music New Zealand Foundation and the Lilburn Residence Trust (both of which he chairs). He has received a citation from the Lilburn Trust for outstanding contributions to New Zealand music, a silver medal from the Polish Ministry of Culture, and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2012.