John Wallace, who has died aged 76, was a virtuoso trumpeter, composer and educator whose roots lay in the brass band tradition of working-class communities in his native Fife.

He nurtured that connection throughout a hugely successful and eclectic performing career, as principal trumpet and soloist with leading UK orchestras and conductors, and founder of the Wallace Collection brass ensemble, before becoming principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2002. Wallace was also an effective campaigner for free instrumental tuition in Scottish schools, enabling children of all backgrounds to explore and develop their talents.

Following a music degree at King’s College, Cambridge, and postgraduate composition studies at York University and the Royal Academy of Music in London, Wallace started out composing but found it difficult to make a living from this alone. So in 1974 he auditioned successfully as assistant principal trumpet for the London Symphony Orchestra, then led by André Previn.

He later said that he thought he would be “there for life”. After two years, however, he was wooed by the Philharmonia Orchestra, then conducted by Riccardo Muti, as principal trumpet. The key factor in persuading him, he explained, was that “I’d never heard Brahms played like that and fell in love with the orchestra.” He stayed for 19 years while also becoming principal trumpet with the London Sinfonietta in 1987.

Wallace’s largest audience and one of his more daunting engagements came in July 1981, when his trumpet complemented the voice of Kiri Te Kanawa in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at the wedding of the Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul’s Cathedral, with 750 million television viewers around the world. It was a triumph that consolidated his position as a pre-eminent exponent of the instrument.

He had a great interest in exploring lesser-known composers for the trumpet and expanding the repertoire for the instrument. Alongside his orchestral commitments, he developed a career as a soloist, making many recordings of key compositions and giving the premieres of trumpet concertos by Malcolm Arnold (1983), Peter Maxwell Davies (1988) and James MacMillan (titled Epiclesis, 1993), among others.

He premiered Mark-Anthony Turnage’s double trumpet concerto Dispelling the Fears, with Håkan Hardenberger, in 1995, and they gave another performance the following year at the BBC Proms. In 1996 he joined the pianist Joanna MacGregor and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for Shostakovich’s concerto for piano, trumpet and strings under Andrew Davis for the Last Night of the Proms. His own compositions included a song cycle, The Centre of Things; Symphony for Brass Band; and a fanfare performed for the 25th anniversary of the Scottish parliament in 2024, with King Charles and Queen Camilla in attendance.

He secured greater performing freedom by forming, in 1986, the Wallace Collection, made up of similarly free spirits who shared a mission to take brass music to the world.

He returned to the 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. He brought tremendous flair to this role, which he held for 12 years. In 2011, the name changed to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect Wallace’s success in making it a greatly expanded centre of excellence for all the performing arts.

After retiring from the conservatoire in 2014, Wallace became convener of the Music Education Partnership Group, which campaigned for free music tuition in Scotland’s schools at a time when it was rapidly eroding. By 2021, this had secured an undertaking from the Scottish government that it would provide funding to local authorities to underpin free tuition.

Wallace himself was the embodiment of why access to music at a young age is so crucial. The son of Ann (nee Allan) and Christopher (always known as Kiff), he was born and grew up in Methilhill, a part of Fife where the Tullis Russell paper mill was a major employer amid mining communities in which the brass band culture flourished.

His family were stalwarts of the Tullis Russell Mills Band, in which his father, a joiner at the mill, played for 63 years. John joined the junior band on cornet at the age of seven.

The educational methods deployed by his early musical tutors were of the old school. His mother insisted that her husband was too hard on the child and the role was allotted instead to an electrician at the mill, Geordie Baxter, who would “whack you on the finger with his pencil” in response to an errant note, Wallace recalled. “But it sure helped the fingering.”

By 15 he was playing trumpet in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He later recalled being taken under the wing of the orchestra’s founder, Dame Ruth Railton, wife of the Daily Mirror owner Cecil King. She wanted him to play Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto and put him up in their house near Hampton Court, complete with butler, for daily lessons.

The orchestra’s European tour opened in Portugal and the Fife teenager found himself feted by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, who was “a chum of King’s”. It was the start of a career that would carry Wallace from his working-class community into the great concert halls of the world. From Buckhaven high school, which had a strong reputation for music tuition, he went to Cambridge, where his formal teaching was augmented through contact with contemporaries including the conductors Mark Elder and David Atherton.

He edited several books of trumpet music and co-wrote The Trumpet (2011) and co-edited in 1997 The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments. He was made OBE in 1995 and CBE in 2011, and was presented with the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. The Musicians’ Union, of which Wallace was a lifetime member, described him as “one of the UK’s greatest musical polymaths and a highly respected advocate for music education”.

Last year, two of the many further honours reflected his musical journey. The Scottish Brass Band Association, of which he was patron, gave him its outstanding achievement award, while the Royal Philharmonic Society made him an honorary member.

He married Elizabeth Hartwell in 1971. She survives him, along with their son and daughter.

• John Wallace, trumpet player, composer and educator, born 14 April 1949; died 11 January 2026