Allan Stephenson

Allan Stephenson (1949-2021) British-born cellist, conductor and composer.

Biography

Born in 1949 in the UK, Stephenson began playing the piano aged seven, and picked up the cello when he was 13. In 1968 he enrolled at the Royal Manchester College of Music, graduating in 1972. At this time he worked as a free-lance cellist and frequently played in the Royal London Philharmonic Orchestra The next year he moved to South Africa where he became sub-principal cellist with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. He also taught the cello at the South African College Schools, and was closely associated with the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he lectured in cello and composition, and directed the UCT College Orchestra. He founded the Cape Town Chamber Orchestra and ran the I Musicanti string orchestra for several years.

Stephenson composed a number of symphonies, overtures, concertos, toccatas and chamber music.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

With Willem van der Walt and Michael Williams, he wrote the opera/musical Animals (1982) based on George Orwell's Animal Farm. Stephenson composed the opera, The Dark Tale (1991). With librettist Michael Williams, he composed the operas: Wonderfully Wicked; Who Killed Jimmy Valentine? (1995); and The Orphans of Qumbu (1993), which has seen some 3,000 orphans of all races taking part. He also composed one act of writer/director Michael Williams’s Mandela Trilogy (2010), which documented the three stages of Nelson Mandela’s life.