Adventurer and virtuoso Rosemary Tuck plays the Celtic Fantasies of Vincent Wallace - reviewed by PATRIC STANDFORD '... splendid performance ...'

Perhaps the successful and much lauded London production of Vincent Wallace's opera Maritana at Drury Lane on the evening of 15 November 1845 has not quite left its mark on the musical world after all, though over subsequent months it had more than fifty performances and one of its songs, 'Scenes that are brightest', was heard everywhere 'from gilded drawing-rooms to barrel-organs'.

He followed it with Mathilda of Hungary two years later and then went to New York on yet another of his colourful and apparently audacious travels as both performer and conductor which had earlier taken him to Australia (where he established a college of music in Sydney) and then to Chile, Argentina, Cuba and Mexico. He returned to London in 1854 with a new wife (although he had one already!) and stayed there for the next ten years, writing among many other things four more operas, before he and his second wife ('Mr and Mrs Wallace, Piano and Violin Duettists') moved to the outskirts of Paris where they were visited regularly by Berlioz, Rossini and Meyerbeer.

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