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.
His family intended him for a career in the law, but he was attracted to the stage. Originally an actor in non-musical plays, he was persuaded to try opera and made an immediate success. He played a range of buffo parts in operas, at Glyndebourne and internationally. Wallace maintained a simultaneous career in revue, straight theatre, and broadcasting. He appeared in pantomime and at the Royal Variety Performance. 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. He performed his one-man show for many years. Flanders and Swann wrote several songs for him, and their best-known novelty song, "The Hippopotamus", became indelibly associated with him.
Life and career[edit]
Early years[edit]
Wallace was born in London, the only son of a Liberal Member of Parliament, Sir John Wallace and his wife Mary Bryce Wallace (née Temple).[1] He was educated at Charterhouse School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read law and joined the Cambridge Footlights. During his World War II service in the Royal Artillery, he organised and starred in troop shows. Wallace was invalided out of the Army in 1944, after he contracted spinal tuberculosis, and decided that his career lay in entertainment rather than the law.[2]
He first appeared on the professional stage in Glasgow, in Ashley Dukes's The Man With a Load of Mischief. He made his London stage début in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in James Bridie's play The Forrigan Reel, directed by Alastair Sim.[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.[3]
Opera[edit]
Wallace made his operatic début at the Cambridge Theatre in 1946, as Colline in La bohème. He sang there with established operatic stars such as Mariano Stabile and Margherita Grandi.[3] His other roles with the company were the Sacristan (Tosca), Bartolo (The Barber of Seville), Ceprano (Rigoletto) and Masetto (Don Giovanni).[4] The critic of The Times thought Wallace overplayed the buffo element, both as the Sacristan and Bartolo, but praised his singing.[5]
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Recordings[edit]
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.[37] His other Glyndebourne recordings included Ser Matteo del Sarto in Busoni's Arlecchino, conducted by John Pritchard,[38] Don Magnifico in Rossini's La Cenerentola,[39] and the Governor in Rossini's Le comte Ory, both conducted by Gui.[40] His other operatic recordings included Altomaro in Handel's Sosarme,[41] and Lockit in The Beggar's Opera, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.[42]
Wallace made several recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan roles. For Sargent's EMI series he recorded Pooh-Bah in The Mikado (1957)[43] and Mountararat in Iolanthe (1959).[44] He recorded excerpts from H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and The Gondoliers for an LP issued as "A Gilbert and Sullivan Spectacular", in 1974. He made two further recordings of the role of Pooh-Bah, for BBC Radio in 1966 and BBC television in 1973, but these recordings have never been released commercially.[45]
With Donald Swann he recorded Swann's settings of John Betjeman poems in 1964.[46] He took part in two recordings of Alice in Wonderland, in 1958 as the Mock Turtle,[47] and in 1966 as the Caterpillar, in a set narrated by Dirk Bogarde.[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.[50]
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