John Wallace: Born: April 14, 1949; Died: January 11, 2026
John Wallace, who has died aged 76, sprang to international fame in 1981 when he accompanied the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul’s Cathedral. She, along with Wallace playing solo trumpet obbligato, sang Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim. The television audience was 600 million.
In 2002, Wallace was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, which he ran with an inspired insight. He got drama funded on the same footing as music, incorporated dance into the portfolio and renamed it the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, thus reflecting its new stature. The new wing was named, in his honour, the Wallace Studios.
John Williamson Wallace was born in Methilhill in Fife. His mother, Ann (née Allan) was a textile worker before her marriage to Christopher “Kiff” Wallace, a joiner with Tullis Russell Paper Mills and trumpeter in the works band. It was from hearing his father play the trumpet that Wallace became keen to learn the instrument. “My first memories are of my dad playing and how beautiful it was,” he once said.
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He was soon playing with the Coaltown of Balgonie Prize Silver Band. Within a year, he was promoted to the senior band. In 1958 he played in his first competition at the Usher Hall.
Wallace attended Buckhaven High School where he shone as a music student. He gained much from his inspiring teacher, Albert Cochrane, and at 15 he played the taxing solo of the Haydn trumpet concerto on the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s European tour. The orchestra’s founder, Dame Ruth Railton, encouraged him to apply to Cambridge. A special entrance exam had to be held in isolation and the school’s broom cupboard under the main stairs was emptied. In that cramped space Wallace auditioned and was offered a place at King’s College.
After studying at King’s College and the Royal Academy of Music, he joined the London Symphony Orchestra in 1974 but within two years he was offered the post of principal trumpet at the Philharmonia Orchestra. He stayed there for 20 years.
Wallace encouraged contemporary composers to write for the trumpet and while with the Philharmonia he gave the premiers of concerti by composers such as Malcolm Arnold, Peter Maxwell Davies, Mark Anthony Turnage and James MacMillan.
He formed The Wallace Collection in 1986 which brought together a group of dedicated and hugely gifted brass players whose playing breathed life and energy into brass music – traditional and contemporary. Indeed, its Sousa album reached number one in the US. The Collection gained an international reputation with concerts and visits to many festivals, especially the Edinburgh Festival where they played at every festival from 1986-89 and then in 1993 and ’98. The sheer variety of their programming (from accompanying the Festival Chorus to Spanish Renaissance music) demonstrated the wide range of music that inspired Wallace.
He was also closely associated with the East Neuk Festival that brought him back to his roots. In 2017 he led a special project in which he took a very personal interest by bringing together 60 brass players to celebrate the musical heritage of the Fife coalfield, including the Tullis Russell Mills Band.
His adventurous spirit was further demonstrated with his residency at St Andrews University as part of St Andrews Music Participation, a scheme to encourage young brass players.
He returned to London’s Royal Academy in 1992 as head of brass and a decade later moved to Glasgow as principal of what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. It was an inspired appointment and he not only generated the funds for the considerable rebuilding but improved the standard of musical and drama teaching. He initiated new programmes in various vital disciplines of the arts and with his genial flair for communication, raised the profile of the Conservatoire world-wide.
Wallace received many awards, including the CBE in 2011, and had honorary membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society presented to him in Edinburgh in 2024.
He was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer and a brain tumour in 2024 and was treated at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow and the Beatson Cancer Clinic. When he was in the latter the indefatigable Wallace decided, “while flat on my back in the Beatson I got myself a pen, paper and laptop” and decided he could make brass band arrangements. Wallace organised concerts in aid of cancer charities in Scotland especially for the Beatson.
Wallace was a much-loved figure with musicians and students both in Scotland and the south. His energy and enthusiasm are fondly remembered at the RCS where a colleague said, “John’s knowledge and kindness was gloriously infectious.”
In 1971, he married Elizabeth (née Hartwell). She survives him, together with their children Cosmo and Esme.
ALASDAIR STEVEN
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