Founded by John Wallace in 1986 to explore and perform the extensive brass repertory, The Wallace Collection is one of the world's pioneering brass ensembles with an international reputation for innovative programming. After a twelve-year sabbatical, the ensemble was relaunched in May 2014 at a Park Lane Group concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Currently it aims to achieve the extraordinary and exceptional in brass through focusing on the music of today in close juxtaposition with the lost repertory of the 19th century.

Brass instruments have been prominent in Peter Maxwell Davies’s music since his Op. 1, a trumpet sonata he wrote the year he turned twenty-one. The focus of this record, however, is on music from a long quarter-century later: the Brass Quintet he produced in 1981 and a spray of pieces that came in the immediate wake of that major effort, including not only two smaller items for the same formation but also a horn solo that, though so different in scale, is related in substance to the quintet. Trumpet tunes continue the story into the next two decades.