Ian Wallace (bass-baritone)
Ian Bryce Wallace OBE (10 July 1919 – 12 October 2009) was an English bass-baritone opera and concert singer, actor and broadcaster of Scottish extraction.
As a broadcaster, he was a long-time panellist on the BBC radio panel game My Music, and he presented a television series of introductions to operas in the 1960s, as well as appearing in light entertainment shows singing a range of songs from ballads to comedy numbers.
[3] He was doubtful of his suitability for an operatic career, but in 1946 friends persuaded him to audition for the conductor Alberto Erede, who engaged him for the first season of the New London Opera Company.
[5] From 1948 to 1961, Wallace performed regularly at Glyndebourne Festival Opera,[4] making his début as Samuele in Un ballo in maschera but soon specialising in basso buffo roles, notably Bartolo in both The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville.
Again in Scotland, he appeared at Ledlanet Nights in his one-man shows and other performances including Colas in Mozart's early singspiel Bastien und Bastienne;[12] Schlendrian in Bach's Coffee Cantata;[13] and Mr Somers in Gentleman's Island by Joseph Horovitz.
[16] Though not a fluent sight-reader of unfamiliar music,[3] Wallace took on out-of-the way operatic roles including Konchak in Prince Igor,[17] Wagner in Busoni's Doktor Faust,[18] the title role in Weber's Peter Schmoll,[19] the buffo lead, Buonafede, in Haydn's Il mondo della luna,[20] and Calender in Gluck's comédie mêlée d'ariettes, La rencontre imprévue.
Mind you, anyone who has the hardihood to allow the curtain to rise on them at the Criterion Theatre, sitting in a wing chair with a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, has bloody well got to have command of his audience".
[24] He also contributed to Ledlanet Nights, held at the then house of his first publisher, John Calder, appearing there in his one-man show and in comic roles in musical works.
[25] In the theatre, Wallace's roles included Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, of which The Times wrote, "he takes the stage like one inspired, and the result can seldom have been funnier".
A later character role in a television drama was the Praelector, spouting Latin and bemusing Ian Richardson as the new head of a Cambridge college, in the 1987 dramatisation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue.
[32] To the general public, Wallace was best known as a panellist throughout the 27-year run of the BBC radio panel game My Music, from 1967 to 1994, not missing a single episode of more than 520 that were broadcast.
[33][34] After retiring from opera, as President of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, Wallace was prominent in the fight to stop the BBC from making drastic cuts in its orchestras in 1980.
[1] On 26 June 2009, Wallace and Denis Norden were interviewed for BBC Radio 4's obituary programme Last Word, providing reminiscences of their My Music colleague Steve Race, who died earlier that week.
[3] Wallace recorded the role of Doctor Bartolo in both The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, with Glyndebourne Festival Opera forces, conducted by Vittorio Gui.
[48] Discs of his programmes of varied music included An Evening's Entertainment with Ian Wallace, recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1971,[49] and From Mud to Mandalay in 1977.
