Tag Archives: John Wallace

Echoes in Stone and Brass |100 Tubas at Amisfield

Posted on by

Glasgow Cathedral/Amisfield Walled Garden

Substantially occasioned by the passing of John Wallace, inspirational trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2026 has been a busy year for fans of music for brass. Lammermuir Festival’s contribution to his remembrance was exactly the sort of ambitiously mad event he would have taken part in himself.

The Walled Garden of the Amisfield estate at Haddington is vast, dates back to the 18th century and is now tended by an army of volunteers. It was the venue for this year’s Lammermuir project by Red Note Ensemble, previously responsible for music beneath the wings of the Concorde in the aircraft museum at East Fortune.

Perhaps there was a generous attitude to recruitment for 100 Tubas at Amisfield, but not far off that total of instruments was achieved, most of them tuba-shaped if not sized, and capable of producing a similar sound. The score they tackled was Anthony Braxton’s Composition No 19, written – for 100 Tubas – in the 1970s but, perhaps understandably, unheard until it was played in New York City two decades ago.

Like that one, this was a promenade performance, the audience bussed-in from central Haddington and then free to wander within the garden walls. On arrival, a rainbow enlivened the ever-present threat of rain which never materialised, but a less windy day would probably have allowed the sound to carry and bounce off the high walls more often than such echoes were detectable.

The tubas, sousaphones and smaller horns were deployed in four groups, each with their own conductor, moving about the garden. Repeating figures were swapped around the space, and there was the freedom, fairly strictly delineated, for some improvisation – embraced with more enthusiasm by some players than others.

Mostly the score is about ensemble sound, and the topography of the garden – which includes orchards, potagers, and a maze, as well as avenues of flowers – meant that the environment played an important role in how the ensembles sounded. Nonetheless, it might have been a very samey hour of music had the producers not added a quartet of trumpets, whose clarion calls separated the tuba excursions, with music by Benjamin Britten and Lewis Murphy on their stands.

100 Tubas at Amisfield convened on the penultimate day of Lammermuir, and two days earlier this year’s Glasgow Cathedral Festival commenced with Echoes in Stone and Brass, curated by the RSNO’s principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen

To an extent Magnussen was also emcee of that hour of music in the nave of the Cathedral, his solo improvisation opening the sequence and also possibly – but very subtly – signalling its ending, but the designation “curator” was quite specific. This programme was a collective effort, and that was its great strength.

Although that beginning was one of a series of six “improvisations” through the programme, some were far from as free as jazz players would understand the term, the ten-strong Glasgow Cathedral Choir, for example, working with music written by Ailie Robertson and to a defined, if organic, structure.

Between those were a selection of specific compositions, two – on which Magnussen was joined by fellow RSNO trombonist Cillian O Ceallachain and the choir – originally commissioned for Nordic Music Days 2024 and composed by Drew Hammond (who added some organ playing) and Claire McCue, and two from the repertoire of the Rookh Quartet, playing Jan Garbarek on Wagner tubas, and Allisson Kruusmaa on French horns.

The sonic skills of Sam McErlean, contributing live electronics as well as the superb ambient mix in the space, were central to another pair of pieces, The Heavier it Rocks by Sofia Kiviniemi and the rendition of the Seikilos Epitaph, a very early piece of musical notation engraved on a pillar in ancient Greece.

Andrew Forbes, Director of Music at the cathedral, also played some organ and conducted the more formal choir music, while the closing commission, Things Must Pass by Neil Tomas Smith, added more brass from the Conservatoire, RSNO and The Cooperation Band. The reverberation with this sanctuary’s ancient walls launched the festival as only those instruments really can.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Stuart Armitt (Amisfield) and Campbell Parker (Cathedral)

EIF: Edinburgh Festival Chorus / Sean Shibe / Brass Fanfare

Posted on by

Usher Hall / Queen’s Hall

THERE is plenty in this year’s Edinburgh Festival to justify its “International” middle-name, but the home team has also played a blinder during its first ten days.

Edinburgh Festival Chorus, having partnered a soulful chamber choir for the opening concert, proved their own gospel credentials in This Shining Night, a late evening programme of often-unaccompanied singing at the Usher Hall, five days later.

Two settings of James Agee’s poem Sure on this Shining Night, by Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen, bracketed a programme that was prefaced by a nod to the chorus’s founder Arthur Oldham with his 1963 composition, Sacerdos et Pontifex.

There was nothing especially startling about EFC tackling those – although the Lauridsen was a lovely way to end the recital – but what came in between was more interesting.

This programme of American choral music, much of it of recent vintage, had been compiled to complement the US theme of the Festival, linked to the 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and was conducted by Sofi Jeannin.

There was plenty of these singers’ gospel choir side as part of that, from Aaron Copland’s At the River, William Dawson’s Soon Ah Will Be Done and an encore of Moses Hogan’s arrangement of Deep River,  to the 21st century’s I’ve Been in the Storm So Long by Jeffrey Ames and The Road Home by Stephen Paulus.

Texts for the Psalms were the link between Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow, which has becomes a contemporary classic, and Nico Muhly’s A Good Understanding, enlivened by Tom Hunter’s percussion as well as the Usher Hall organ, played by Imogen Morgan.

At the piano, Stuart Hope was as often required to give a starting note to the singers as provide accompaniment, but his playing was a critical ingredient of the concert’s centre-piece, Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.

Setting the reported last utterances of seven black men who died at the hands of US authority, culminating in Eric Garner’s globally-reported “I can’t breathe”, the liturgical reference in the title gives shape to an incredibly powerful work. It included a moving solo from tenor Sam Britner, one of the this year’s cohort of EIF Rising Stars of Voice, who featured throughout the programme, and added a quartet to Reena Ismail’s When the Violin, which also had the RSNO’s Pei-Jee Ng on obligato cello.

Together, all eight of the Rising Stars performed Gabriela Lena Frank’s Chicanophobia!, a denunciation of discrimination which took an altogether different, mocking and amusing, approach to the darker side of American society.

Guitarist Sean Shibe could hardly be more local to Queen’s Hall venue – a flat just around the corner was his first family home – but the internationally-acclaimed local musician had to wait until his mid-30s to make his EIF recital debut, although he has presented innovative concerts on the Fringe.

For this programme he played only one classical instrument, but the music made a compact conversation of five centuries of composition, firstly in Spain, then after the interval in England.

We began in Seville, with two of the Fantasias composed by priest Alonso Mudarra in 1546, before leaping forward to the 20th century commercial appropriation of his influence by Rodrigo for Segovia and then to the 2025 composition Sefarad by Francisco Coll, who studied in London with Thomas Ades.

Its four movements have their roots in early music and specifically that of Sephardic Jews, to whom Coll can trace his own origins. The suite brings together previously-composed pieces with two new movements, Suegra (mother-in-law) and Hija (daughter) and those were the most compelling, although the whole piece is very fine.

Three works by John Dowland, from the end of the 16th century and start of the 17th, prefaced Forgotten Dances by Ades himself, a six-movement work that Shibe has championed and recorded. It was developed from the Habanera in Ades’ opera The Exterminating Angel to embrace tributes to earlier composers, culminating in Vesper, a reworking of Henry Purcell, which led perfectly into Shibe’s most popular encore – his own arrangement of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness.

Brass Fanfare – Tribute to John Wallace (Photo: Ga-Ken-Wan)

Local hero John Wallace was remembered in the Usher Hall concert between those two events, entitled Brass Fanfare. That was exactly the way in which it began, with a vast ensemble of players performing Bendinelli’s Sonata No 336, as arranged by the dynamic trumpeter and former Principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

On stage were his own Wallace Collection group, the Cooperation Band, brass players from all of Scotland’s professional orchestras, and youngsters from the RCS Junior Conservatoire and St Andrew’s Music Participation (StAMP).

The Fifer’s own composition skills were showcased in two movements from his Symphony for Brass played by the Wallace Collection and the Cooperation Band, before the orchestral players, again conducted by Clark Rundell, gave a superb account of Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

If it reflected Wallace’s professional career, the perfectly-titled Lament, Hope, and Stomp which followed and concluded the concert, exemplified his enthusiasm for music education and the widest possible public participation. Percussionists from East Edinburgh’s Oi Musica joined the massed brass for an exuberant finale to an excellent tribute to a very well-loved musician.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

John Wallace

Posted on by

Trumpeter John Wallace, who has died at the age of 76 following treatment for cancer, was one of the most dynamic musicians of his generation. Following a career on the front desks of three London orchestras and the founding of his own brass ensemble, the Wallace Collection, he was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2002.

His tenure at the institution, which ran until his retirement in 2014, was transformative, including the name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect the expanded range of the teaching portfolio, and the opening of the Wallace Studios next to Scottish Opera’s rehearsal space at Speirs Wharf.

Born in Methil in Fife, John began his musical career playing cornet in his father’s works band, the Tullis Russell Mills Band in Glenrothes. In more recent years he performed alongside current players as one of a series of engagements at the East Neuk Festival.

After the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he studied music at King’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and York University.

A recipient of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2011, he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. He had been a featured soloist alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He was made a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society last year.

Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, who succeeded him as RCS Principal, said yesterday: “John Wallace was a legend in the music world – one of Scotland’s own who gave so much to the world as a performer, educator and leader. He was also incredibly warm and approachable.”

During his cancer treatment, John Wallace returned to his first study of composition and gave one of his last interviews to Vox Carnyx last year to publicise a concert featuring his own arrangements in aid of Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Charity.https://voxcarnyx.com/2025/02/13/inspired-by-adversity/

Inspired by Adversity

Posted on by

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

Glasgow Cathedral Festival

Posted on by

Artistic Director Andrew Forbes and his small team achieve a minor miracle each year with their long weekend of diverse and often bold and experimental music in the superb environment of Glasgow Cathedral. Saturday evening’s programme was a good indicator of that range, and the unique atmosphere the building provides.

Cellist William Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble brought a programme that was diverse in itself, beginning with a quartet by Mozart and ending with a work for the same forces by Krzysztof Penderecki – the Polish composer to whose memory Sir James MacMillan has dedicated his new violin concerto.

Although Conway himself played in all but one of the five works, much of the focus in the recital was on Yann Ghiro and Scott Dickinson, principal clarinet and principal viola in the BBC SSO, with violinist David Alberman the other member of this edition of the versatile group.

Mozart’s Adagio for Basset Horn and String Trio might only have become such in the hands of German musicologist Ernst Lewicki, but its melodic material is familiar from the composer’s repurposing of it and the lead instrument is one for which he had a demonstrable enthusiasm.

Penderecki’s Quartet exploits the similar tonal range of the clarinet and viola in its opening and closing movements as the cello and violin add single note “drones” to the sound. The clarinet is also to the fore in the sprightly and slightly bluesy Scherzo; only in the third movement Serenade is there a more democratic share of the lead line.

The other curiosity by a big name was Leonard Bernstein’s Variations on an Octatonic scale, five bite-sized miniatures that fuelled his Concerto for Orchestra. They were performed here by Conway and Ghiro, and the fourth, with its staccato clarinet and pizzicato cello was a particular delight.

The programme was completed by two newer works from composers living or working in Scotland, David Fennessy and Helen Grime. Almost the definition of minimalism and restraint, with much use of harmonics, Fennessy’s Changeless And The Changed is a duo for violin and cello that takes a single musical idea, botanical in inspiration, and explores it thoroughly. To See The Summer Sky, by Grime, pairs violin and viola with the lower instrument often taking the lead, especially in the faster sections of the score.

If the Hebrides’ package presented an opportunity to hear music that rarely has an outing, the event that followed was a one-off delight. De Profundis: A Tribute to Scottish Miners began life at the East Neuk Festival five years ago, performed in smoky half-light in The Bowhouse, the former agricultural building that has become the festival’s main large venue.

This revisiting of the work by John Wallace, his professional brass-playing colleagues in The Wallace Collection, and Tony George, the tuba-playing director of the Tullis Russell Band who is now working with The Cooperation Band, also involved Renfrew Burgh Band. The massed brass also included, unbilled, a few players from Fife who simply wanted to be involved again and were prepared to travel to do so.

If the pit-invoking haze was less dense this time, the lighting and use of the building was twice as spectacular. The score Wallace has created, mining material from settings of Psalm 130, Out Of The Deep, ranges from classic brass band sound to choral polyphony, constantly in flux and with the glorious punctuation of a virtuosic trumpet solo from on high and a robust percussion interlude. From the quire of the cathedral, Brenda Craig recited the four poems that are part of the piece, one of them miner/writer Joe Corrie’s The Image o’ God.

Word had clearly got out that this was a spectacular not to be missed and the Cathedral Festival team were rewarded by a very good attendance for an occasion that will live long in the memory.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Hebrides Ensemble by David Lee

The Wallace Collection

Posted on by
  • The Wallace Collection ON SONG
  • Origins of the Species Revisited
  • The Golden Age of the 19th Century Brass Virtuoso Vol 1

(TWC)

Since retiring from his adventurous tenure as principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, trumpeter John Wallace has found time and energy to reignite his eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection. And with it now comes not one, but three simultaneous new releases on the group’s own recording label, one recorded as far back as 1999. There are still more to come, says Wallace, who remains as indefatigable and evangelical as ever.

Of the three, one in particular stands out. Titled The Wallace Collection ON SONG, it takes traditional brass ensemble repertoire out of its homogenous comfort zone to include two singers (the operatic soprano Julia Daramy-Williams and Gaelic singer/songwriter Ainsley Hamill) and a juicy assortment of commissioned works, anchored effectively by the substantial centrally-positioned Symphony for Brass by Malcom Arnold. 

All in all, it’s an album whose stylistic variety is packaged within the cohesive strength of its agile, polished performances. (If only the typos – “Pollockshields”? “Orechestra”? – had been sorted out in the sleeve notes!)

The youngest of the composers is Francisco Coll, a Valencian in his mid-thirties, whose Quintet for Brass, composed last year, is infinitely more exhilarating than its workaday title. The opening Prologue, which snakes around in an unrelenting mood of exploration; the dark subterranean landscape that opens the Chorale; the chattering Fanfares, the lyrically-sinuous Canzona and final surge of adrenalin that is the closing Sequence; all are equally integral and distinctive in creating a genuinely arresting work.

Songs of the North is the first of the vocal works, written for Wallace’s 65th birthday in 2014 by one of Scotland’s truly unsung creative heroes, 72-year-old Edward McGuire. Foremost in these musical travelogues – McGuire’s own reminiscences of visits to Greenland and Iceland combined with metaphorical references to Wallace’s own imminent “new musical voyage” at the time – is a crystalline simplicity and self-generating energy expressed through economically transparent brass writing, a neoclassical swing that drives it along, and a seamless lyricism captured with engaging descriptiveness by Daramy-Williams.

Beyond the idiomatic wholesomeness and charismatic rhythms of Arnold’s 1978 Symphony for Brass, the focus falls on Wallace’s own compositions. The first, An t-Eilean is a moody Gaelic ballad in which Hammill’s soothing mezzo-soprano is accompanied by trumpet and piano, the latter’s ubiquitous presence marked by jazz-like infusions that amplify the vocalist’s sultry melancholy. 

The other, The Flannan Isle, is an impetuous curiosity literally jigsawed together by recording engineer Daniel de Gruchy-Lambert, who also plays organ and all three trumpet parts. Wallace’s setting of Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s poem unfolds with frenetic impatience, vocally virtuosic, emotionally raw, and with a filmic instrumental underscore that never lets up.

The other two Wallace Collection releases are of more immediate likely interest to the brass connoisseur. Origin of the Species Revisited focuses on four of the twelve quintets written by Frenchman Jean François Bellon (1795-1869), currently the earliest known composer to have written for such a combo. Played on period instruments, including the rounded nobility of the ophicleide, there are peculiar tuning issues which, depending on your preference, will be either endearingly quaint or ultimately nauseating.
 
The ophicleide is present again in The Golden Age of the 19th Century Brass Virtuoso, Vol 1, which features Wallace on cornet and Anthony George on ophicleide, both playing 19th century period instruments, with Arron Shorr and Simon Wright sharing the honours on a lightweight 1844 Broadwood grand piano. Musically, the gamut is huge, from John Braham’s lugubrious The Death of Nelson to a charmingly ironic transcription of Handel’s “O Ruddier than the Cherry” (from Acis and Galatea) with ophicleide replacing the original obligato recorder. For David, read Goliath.
Ken Walton