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Photo: Katie Kaars
SALLY WALKER
Flauto Traverso
With a repertoire ranging from Early Music to works composed for her, Sally Walker performs on modern and historical flutes and has appeared in the London Proms, Salzburg, Lucerne, Edinburgh, Leipzig Bach and Tanglewood festivals.
She was twice runner-up in the finals of Limelight Magazine’s ‘Artist of the Year’ award (2024, 2025), prize-winner in the Friedrich Kuhlau International Flute Competition (Germany) and finalist in the 2026 APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards’ ‘Work of the Year – Dramatic’ for Living Poems of the Sea (written and composed by Lyle Chan), a one-person performance exploring human-cetacean interactions on 5 flutes, percussion, with narration synchronised to over and underwater visuals.
A devoted chamber musician, Sally has performed in all major Australian chamber music festivals and has established duos with pianist Simon Tedeschi and harpist Emily Granger, with whom she released the ‘intoxicatingly beautiful’ (The Australian, 2023) album Something like this. Her Boccherini: Chamber Works for Flute album together with leading Adelaide-based chamber musicians received 5 stars in BBC Music Magazine (2024).
She has performed with Early Music Ensembles including Neues Bachisches Collegium Musicum Leipzig, Das Neue Orchester Köln, Salut! Baroque, Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, Canberra Bach Ensemble, Apeiron Baroque, extensively with harpsichordist Dr Rosalind Halton and looks forward to forthcoming projects with lutenists Rosemary Hodgson and George Wills.
Over 60 compositions by over 30 composers have been written for her and her album of Australian Flute Concertos written for her by Elena Kats-Chernin, Christopher Sainsbury, Alex Turley as well as her own arrangement of Peggy Glanville-Hicks' Concerto Romantico with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra/Jessica Cottis will be released in February 2027.
Sally has toured internationally and recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras, was Principal Flute of the Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss, a member of Kölner Kammer Orchester and has performed as Guest Principal Flute with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Kammerakademie Potsdam, NDR Radio Philharmonie Hannover and has a long-standing association as Guest Principal Flautist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
She is guest teacher at the Australian National Academy of Music and served as Senior Lecturer in Performance at the Australian National University (2018–2026), and Lecturer in Flute at the University of Newcastle (2007–2018) where she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in teaching. Sally’s students learn baroque flute alongside modern flute and piccolo from a method derived from findings from her doctoral thesis (University of Sydney), which explored pedagogical and neurophysiological implications in switching between modern and historical flutes, studying baroque flute with Hans-Dieter Michatz and Karl Kaiser.
She contributes to many socially driven projects including 1:1 CONCERTS, the Equal Music program (Illumina Festival), and is the Ambassador for the Symphony for Life Foundation.
