The Wigmore Hall director talks to Ben Hogwood about the London venue’s 125th anniversary celebrations, the 2026-27 season and what keeps him motivated in his role after 25 years.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been a concert hall on London’s Wigmore Street, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the hullabaloo of Oxford Street. Opened as the Bechstein Hall in 1901, the Wigmore Hall has become an institution in British musical life. For its last 25 years the hall has been under the artistic direction of John Gilhooly, who is also the venue’s executive director. John generously gave Arcana a chance to discuss his plans for the hall in its 125th anniversary year and a packed, vibrant 2026/27 season. To begin, however, I asked him to recall his first visit to Wigmore Hall.
“It was in the 1990s, to hear Sir Thomas Allen in a program of mostly French song. The hall wasn’t quite full, and I got a last-minute ticket as a student. I ended up sitting in the back row. My memory was that Tom sang very well, and that Roger Vignoles was accompanying him. He sang some Fauré, but I remember three men sitting beside me at the time, all scribbling, and thinking they must be the critics.”
A link had already been forged, however. “Wigmore concerts used to come to my home town of Limerick, and the local music promoter, John Ruddock, the principal of the Protestant school beside my Catholic school, ran the Limerick music society with his wife. So I heard András Schiff, the Takács Quartet – who remembered me in the audience! – Imogen Cooper and Wolfgang Holzmair, probably the first lieder singer I ever heard. I heard Angela Gheorghiu before anybody knew who she was, I remember that recital very well. My ear was trained very early on to the Wigmore Hall; I knew what it was – but I remember expecting it to be so much bigger! I got used to it very quickly.”
At the time, there was competition. “I didn’t leave Ireland until 1997, and at that stage my first love was opera. I don’t think I could say that anymore, my brain has been completely rewired! I love the opera, of course, and obviously I love chamber music because that’s what we heard at home. My teacher, Veronica Dunne (he points at a photograph behind me), was the last person to sing with Kathleen Ferrier. She drove me up from being a baritone to a tenor and had me singing lots of arias. Song was not her thing, but for my first teacher, Jean Holmes, song was very much her thing – and she went on to sing at Covent Garden. She was my first proper singing teacher. We learned singing at school, and settings of the Latin mass, which was very important in my formation in every sense. That happened very early on, which is why I keep saying if you don’t get 7- and 8-year-olds, you’ll never get them interested in music. It doesn’t cost anything to sing in a choir, so I don’t understand why the government don’t take that on, frankly. Music provision is so bad in schools, we won’t have audiences as diverse as they should be in the future.”
His frustration is evident. “It’s really easy – I just don’t understand. Get children singing!” To that end, the BBC’s recent initiative, Get Singing, is timely. “It’s what it does in terms of the physiology of the voice, the vibrations and everything that’s going on, that communal experience. There is something very special in that, the friendships you make – and it’s a pity that it’s just not embraced, but it’s great to see Radio 3 doing this.”
Do many schools visit the Wigmore Hall? “Yes, there were some in to see the Hugh Cutting concert last night”, he says. “Part of the announcement for the new season is that from September we will introduce free tickets for under-25s, as long as they bring a parent or guardian. Hopefully we can get the parents interested in the music as well, if they’re not. That is an expansion of the under-35 scheme, which has done really well since its launch ten years ago. We also have five new strategic partnerships in Europe – with the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, where we will expand our relationship, and the new hall in Edinburgh, the Dunard Centre. I’ve been asked to chair the programme committee for the opening in 2029. There is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, and finally Glyndebourne, whose singers will come here for recitals. These are new partnerships which enhance our position, in the post ‘non-public’ funding.”
For the Wigmore Hall is now entirely free of dependency on the Arts Council for grants and artistic direction – a liberating situation indeed. “Yes, and nobody in there is public funded either, so we can do what we like with that. It’s going to be very diverse, ticking all the boxes without being told to do so. We want to be diverse, but you don’t need to report back constantly what you’re doing. We’re all being told to do the same thing, but what we need to all find is the things we’re best at – and everybody has their own niche. We should look different to the South Bank, to theatre, dance, and the visual arts, but we’re all being judged by the same criteria, and that’s crazy. The Margaret Hodge report on the Arts Council vindicated everything we said, and I hope for a response in due course.”
One only has to look at a snapshot of programming across a week in the Wigmore Hall’s 2026/27 season to see the variety on offer, for the diversity is astonishing. “We say, without apology, that it is the most diverse classical music programme in the United Kingdom, and one of the most diverse in Europe at this stage. There are 600 concerts a year.” These include composer focuses on Britten, Beethoven, Feldman and Kurtág, along with a comprehensive list of Associate Artists, of which more later. “That’s the reason I get up in the morning”, says Gilhooly. “There will be a lot of that next season, too.”
The new season is effectively given a prologue by two weeks of celebration in May, where the Wigmore’s 125 years as a concert hall will be celebrated. “I built the programming around that anniversary”, he says, “but as far as I’m concerned, the whole season has been a celebration.” Standout examples include a series of songs from the year of opening, 1901, and Songs, Airs & The Blues, a fascinating concert with vocalist Elaine Mitchener and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny which will include the blues as seen by two Robert Johnsons – the Tudor composer and the legendary Blues artist.
“I consciously didn’t do things like brass and wind, because they’ve been done through the season, and so I focussed on strings, piano and voice”, says Gilhooly. I wanted to make a coherent statement, and invite some top-notch singers and pianists. The capacity was there to have Lise Davidsen, Yunchan Lim, and the Leonkoro Quartet (above) who are just astonishing, with Igor Levit. We also have the soprano Asmik Griogorian and the young pianist Lukas Geniušas, who will play the Schubert B flat sonata in a separate concert. We have an evening with the Belcea Quartet and Tabea Zimmermann, then a whole evening of Johann Sebastian Bach with Christian Tetzlaff, which ties in with his 60th birthday. That was very conscious, and then to bring in Stockhausen with mentions of gods and goddesses. Our stage has been watched over by Apollo since 1901, so I wanted to make that point – and replicate the first evening with judicious editing.”
That night will coincide with the launch of a new book on the hall by Julia Boyd, There Is Sweet Music Here. “It’s an astonishing read”, says Gilhooly, “I devoured it in the last 48 hours after it went to print, because I purposely didn’t want to see it before then. She’s a compelling writer, and the early chapters – and the things people didn’t realise – are fascinating. There was no social media of course, just word of mouth between the musicians. There are dips in the history – the First World War, then trouble in the 1960s. I think a defining moment was 1976, the 75th anniversary where Artur Rubenstein played here, and stood up to declare it was his last ever appearance. This was quite something, as he had been attending concerts here since around 1914. He heard Busoni here, and the fact that Fauré was here – drawn by word of mouth – was amazing. The change 50 years later, is interesting to see”.
Clearly understating, he reflects further. “Even 25 years ago, the turnover was £2 million, and now it has been raised to £11-12 million with extra fundraising. The attendance has never dipped, and the audience is very different. I looked at a message from Prince Charles in the anniversary programme for 31 May 2001, and the list of donors then has only five or six that are still alive. The current brochure has a much bigger list, so the notion that the audience is dying is wrong. So where’s the crisis?”
The hall holds a strong appeal to tourists, too. “We had a tube campaign in recent weeks, and the returns for András Schiff mainly went to tourists – a lot of whom came twice. They got Beethoven’s Tempest sonata – and so much more! Some of our visitors plan their London trips around our programme, and while the Monday lunchtime audience is by definition an older one, the evening audiences are very young, very diverse.”
At this point I share my own experience, where I can happily credit Wigmore Hall with introducing me to the idea of a song recital, and – what’s more – enjoying it. “The ear has to adjust, as it is refined listening”, he says, “but not impossible. We are quietly trying surtitles, which will be rolled out quietly in the autumn.”
Gilhooly turns to the announcement of the Associate Artists. “We have five-year partnerships with composer-pianist Thomas Adès, soprano Louise Alder, jazz trumpeter and composer, Ambrose Akinmusire, the Gesualdo Six ensemble, pianist Boris Giltburg, multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, cellist Anastasia Kobekina, the Leonkoro Quartet, the baritone and composer, Will Liverman, jazz pianist, Harold López‑Nussa, mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller, violinist Daniel Pioro, violist Timothy Ridout, cellist Abel Selaocoe, and composer-conductor, Jack Sheen. Finally we have the conductor Peter Whelan, who was here last night with the Irish Baroque Orchestra. We’ve doubled the number of associated artists and it’s exciting.”
Within the hall there is an interesting change in the timeline – where photos of legendary artists appear downstairs and in the green room, but while out front there is a much more recent set of portraits with current and future artists. “That is courtesy of Christopher Jones, who was photographing towards the end of the pandemic, with masks and socially distanced audiences – so it was a very emotional time, and quite bleak in many ways.”
A standout moment of the pandemic was the return of music to the Wigmore Hall, with a solo recital from Sir Stephen Hough with just two audience members – John himself and the BBC Radio 3 presenter Andrew McGregor. “Can you imagine, at that time the government almost said no, but they were having parties right at that time?! We were still locked down a year later, and I remember a St. Patrick’s night lockdown recycle in 2021, and it really struck me that I hadn’t been home for over a year. It went on for so long, but it was a collective trauma, and we’ve all kind of parked it.”
Another key aspect of the Wigmore Hall’s development is its role in developing young artists, such as the YCAT and BBC New Generation Artists. “We collaborate with them, and people who aren’t part of any scheme who we help along as well, for instance the winners of our string quartet and song competitions. We cross fertilise, which is wonderful, and these partnerships will help.”
Also appearing in the new season are the Takács Quartet (above) – themselves celebrating 50 years as an ensemble, with cellist and founder member András Fejér still in the group. “He’s the one who remembers me from Ireland”, says Gilhooly. “They’re playing brilliantly and are teaching in Colorado. There will be a celebration around Gábor Takács-Nagy at some point…they won the first string quartet competition at the Wigmore Hall in 1979, so there’s a continuity there.”
One obvious change around the Wigmore Hall in the last 25 years is its neighbourhood, for as any visitor to central London knows there are building sites and new constructions at every turn. Has that presented a challenge? “We had problems next door, with banging during concerts. We try to get on with the builders, and thankfully there’s no noise from the street. That’s fine – but the area has come on so much, which is wonderful. Marylebone High Street is fantastic, and there is a Marylebone belt – we work in the community here. The concerts at Spanish Place have been a bonus, with things we can’t fit on the stage. There will be more there in the next few years, and I’m talking about a mass for Schubert on the day of his death in 2028.”
On the day we speak, the Duke of Kent visited – to take in a highly emotive concert profiling Irish composer Ina Boyle, through her songs – the sort of cause the Wigmore Hall furthers without ceremony but in a way that is not signposted. “It has to be of a certain quality”, says John. “I’d rather not have a concert than have a bad concert. They lived that today; you need that commitment. I am a patron of the Ina Boyle society, so I have seen the evolution of how the rediscovery has happened, and obviously was convinced quite a while ago.”
What is the immediate and long-term future for the hall? “We’ve gotten so far, and we’ve achieved so much – and the ambition is to keep it there. Sometimes stability, when something moves so much, is important. To have 600 concerts is a risk, financially, but to keep the standards up and to keep introducing fresh things every season is also important. This anniversary looks like a huge peak, but you always find a way of moving it on.”
The concert platform is also surprisingly versatile, fitting a solo pianist one night and the Irish Baroque Orchestra the next. “Last night the stage was packed, and while those concerts cost a bit more to put on, they are special. Hugh Cutting (above) sang brilliantly, it was a very moving concert – with Che faro senza Euridice, but also Caro mio ben, which I haven’t heard in years. People were telling me they haven’t had so much joy from a concert in years. One woman came up to me and said she’s been coming to concerts since she was 16, and is now 89, and she said it was one of the best concerts she’s ever seen. That is what it’s all about!”
Classical music still matters, clearly – though that is not so evident from the media. “There was a time when Sir Michael Tippett was interviewed by Sir Terry Wogan, and what we did was so central. If you look at the great Viennese conductors of the past who used to sell loads of CDs, the glory years of EMI with Maria Callas – and Dame Janet Baker was a household name. How the world has changed, for the worse.”
Talking of recorded media, while the Wigmore Hall still stream concerts, are there plans to revive the record label? “Streaming effectively is the label”, he says, “but it might be directed in a different way. There are some special festival announcements”, he says, intriguingly.
Does the hall still have a transformative effect on John the audience member? “Yes. As I get older, I find I’m able to park the distractions. Sometimes I go in with a problem in the back of my mind, and the concert will fix it for me. The only time I used to have that peace was doing transatlantic flights, when nobody could get to you. I did some of my best programming when travelling, it was important to get out and meet colleagues internationally in Berlin, Paris. It’s very important to see what’s going on in other halls, and it’s a very supportive network – and I hear orchestral concerts to clean out my ears!”
I close by asking Gilhooly to choose an achievement of which he is most proud. “We’ve had refurbishments, and the Covid thing – but independence from public funding, I think, getting 600 concerts. But the greatest achievement is seeing young artists succeed, which is their achievement, but to know we have created the conditions so that that can happen. That’s the most satisfying thing.”
The Wigmore Hall’s 125th anniversary festival begins on Monday 25 May – with further information at the hall’s website. The website also includes a summary of the 2026/27 season. There Is Sweet Music Here: The World of Wigmore Hall, by Julia Boyd, will be published on 21 May and can be ordered here
Published post no.2,885 – Tuesday 12 May 2026
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