VoxCarnyx

What he thought was Covid turned out to be cancer for trumpeter and composer John Wallace, but he wasn’t going to sit on his backside and do nothing, he tells KEN WALTON 

Last summer, the famously indefatigable Fife-born trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, John Wallace, went about his normal business. For him, even in his mid-70s, that meant heading to New York with his eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, to give a series of high-profile concerts in venues that included the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wasn’t, however, the pleasurable experience he’d anticipated. 

“The temperature soared to 105, I was feeling the jet lag more than usual, feeling my age, then we all fell ill with what was assumed to be Covid,” he recalls. When he, himself, tested negative he came home to Glasgow in time for some R&R, he and his wife’s annual road trip to France.

But that didn’t go to plan either. “I thought, I’m gonna drive, but we only got as far as Abington services before I had to pass over to my wife to drive the rest of the way. The long and short of it was, the Covid I thought I had was masking something else. After a few days in France I had this incredible headache, couldn’t sleep, and was hallucinating big time. They took me into intensive care in Toulouse Hospital and found all these things wrong with me.

“Luckily – and I’d really recommend this – we’d taken out Saga insurance who sent across a doctor to take me back to Glasgow.” That involved a high-speed ambulance dash to Toulouse Airport – “doing that on a morphine trip was one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my life” – then again from Edinburgh Airport to Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. “Tests there revealed I had a brain tumour, lung cancer and it was in the liver as well. Christ, I thought, that’s the kibosh on any future plans.”

Except we’re talking about John Wallace, whose glass is invariably half full. The worst part, he says, was watching all those incredible medics getting on with their jobs while he lay flat on his back. “An initial course of immunotherapy drugs failed to work, but by December they’d got something working and I’ve shown steady improvement since,” he reports, impressed by a health service that isn’t getting the greatest press at the moment. 

“I’ve been everywhere in Glasgow – the Victoria Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth, the Beatson Cancer Clinic and the Royal Infirmary for endless tests, and the Mount Florida Health Centre have chipped in too. It’s so brilliantly coordinated; when you’ve got something really wrong with you the NHS can be absolutely superb.”

“Now that I’m out, they’re even coming to my house. I’m so monitored it’s unbelievable. So I feel really quite positive at the moment, that I’ve got more life left in me. My son even got me a fancy exercise bike, so without actually going there I’m currently attempting the Spittal of Glenshee!” 

But there was one other key motivator aiding Wallace’s road to recovery – his undying passion for music. “That played a huge part in keeping me going,” he believes. “It’s amazing when time is at a premium and you don’t think you’ve got much of it left, you return to your most fruitful passions and memories.” 

At the heart of these was his life-long association with the brass band world. “It’s where I first picked up a trumpet, at the age of seven, playing in my first competition at the Usher Hall a year later in 1958. The skill of these bands shouldn’t be underrated. When I joined the LSO in 1974, Andre Previn was conducting Berlioz’s Le Corsaire at the Proms. He happened to hear the Black Dyke Mills Band play the same piece shortly after and said to us: ‘Christ, I wish we could play it as fast as that’.” 

Rather than dwell simply on memories, however, Wallace turned his thoughts to actions. What if, “while flat on my back in the Beatson”,  he was to get himself a pen, paper and laptop and busy himself with brass band arrangements he’d long wished to write but never got round to? 

“My favourite piece is Rimsky Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel”, he says. “I can remember playing it for the Douglas Fairbanks 1924 silent film The Thief of Baghdad at London’s Criterion Theatre in the early ‘80s. Douglas Fairbanks Junior was there to introduce it, showing off all his dad’s skill as an acrobat. Carl Davis did such a wonderful job of adapting the piece. Definitely one of my career highlights. 

“I’ve thought ever since that the Four Tableaux from the opera would make a great band piece – millions of bloody notes – so here was a chance to finally make it happen.  I just wrote it in my bed at the Beatson and learnt a lot more about The Golden Cockerel in the process: that it was banned in Rimsky’s lifetime, for instance, because he was taking the piss out of the Tsar. I just wish there was a Russian composer at the moment willing to take the piss out of Putin – or an American composer to take it out on Trump.” Maybe The Orange Cockerel, I suggest?

Wallace continued with his arrangements throughout his hospitalisation, adding enough music to furnish a full concert programme, Romantic Brass, this Saturday (15 February) in Sherbrooke Mosspark Parish Church by the multi-prizewinning Cooperation Band conducted by Katrina Mazella-Wheeler, proceeds of which will go to the Beatson Cancer Charity. 

It opens with another arrangement on Wallace’s wish list, that of Dvorak’s Four Legends. “I’d just been playing all Ten Legends with my daughter on piano duet and was reminded of how utterly beautiful they are. In my opinion Dvorak was a better miniaturist than symphonist,” he argues. “He wrote great symphonies, but these miniatures are fabulous.”

As, he adds, are the Cooperation Band’s amazing players, which is why Wallace has also come up with a trio of arrangements to showcase some of their star soloists. 

“Cornet player Jimmy Hayes travels up from Newcastle every rehearsal and plays like an angel, which is why I’ve transcribed for him Der Engel from Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. For Flugelhorn player Stephanie Kennedy I’ve recast Schumann’s Ich grolle nicht from the wonderful Dichterliebe. That leaves Soprano player Gordon Kyle – he’s a maniac! – with the Caruso showstopper, Cardillo’s Core ‘ngrato. The band as a whole are a fab bunch of musicians. We’re all keen to see new stuff and push the envelope with brass bands – a fertile meeting of minds.

Will Wallace appear himself? “I looked in on the dress rehearsal, but I’m still not well enough to take part and don’t want to let anybody down by maybe having to walk off the stage flagging,” he admits. “I haven’t been able to play because of the cancer’s effect on my lungs, but the breathing’s getting better, so maybe one day soon.” With Wallace, you can never say never!

Romantic Brass, featuring the Cooperation Band and arrangements by John Wallace, is at Sherbrooke Mosspark Church, Nithsdale Road, Glasgow on Saturday 15 February at 7.30pm. Donations welcome in aid of Beatson Cancer Charity. Further information at www.thecooperationband.co.uk