Wigmore Hall boss John Gilhooly: ‘Classical music would love to be free of public funding'

Telegraph

26-03-2025

Staff at Wigmore Hall have, of late, been walking into London's premier chamber music venue with an extra spring in their step. John Gilhooly, the hall's artistic and executive director since 2005, told them recently that it would stop taking money from Arts Council England, meaning that his charges will no longer be subject to the onerous bureaucracy that comes with being publicly subsidised.
As part of their funding agreements, institutions in receipt of taxpayer cash must produce detailed quarterly reports on three topics: their 'investment principles', activities and finances. So intricate are the demands – on everything from schools outreach to environmental policies – the three accompanying instruction manuals run to a combined 60 pages.
'The amount of quarterly reporting – which goes on and on and on – it zaps creativity. So the organization, all the staff here, suddenly you can feel the energy lifting, because we've told them that within 12 months, they won't have to do this,' Gilhooly says of leaving the Arts Council's portfolio. 'There is a sadness in parting, but our core values don't change.'
The biggest bugbear for Gilhooly is the Art's Council's 10-year mission statement, Let's Create. Published in 2020, it puts more emphasis on social outreach and diversity, equity and inclusion – aka DEI – rather than elite artistic endeavours. Funding has been shifted from large institutions, especially those in London, to community projects. Those that still benefit from the largesse of the public purse are made to work even harder for less.
Sat in Wigmore Hall's smart basement restaurant, Gilhooly tells me that while Let's Create 'has great intentions', it 'inadvertently discriminated against classical music and opera, and I think that's a pity'. The cookie-cutter approach is wrong, he reckons. 'You cannot impose the same criteria on a great artist that you impose on a community event,' he says. 'Of course an amateur choir is excellent, just like amateur football is excellent, but it's not the same as the Olympics. And what we put on the stage here is the Olympics, but we believe in all of it, and all of it can be excellent, but to have this one-size-fits-all criteria, I think, is where the tension has come in.'
The Wigmore is unusual in that it has robust enough finances to be able to decline public cash. The 550-seat venue, which hosts 600 concerts a year, costs about £8.5 million to run each year. A little more than £4 million is generated by ticket sales, with much of the rest coming from donors and sponsors; the Arts Council grant of almost £350,000 only forms 3 per cent of its income and is ultimately not worth the hassle.
'It's jumping through so many hoops and the language is not helpful. It's kind of a language of its own.' Is it corporate jargon? 'It's not even that, it's Arts Council jargon and it's got progressively worse over the years as funding has gone down,' he adds. 'I understand that it is public money and it has got to be accounted for, but there must be a more efficient way of doing it and probably even less intrusive on staff time on trustee time… There are plenty of orchestras and others who I'm sure would love to do this, but they can't.'
The Irish impresario, 51, is keen to emphasise that he would not like to see the Arts Council, which used to own Wigmore Hall, abolished, 'but they have lost the confidence of classical music, and hopefully that can be repaired'. To that end the quango's chairman, Nicholas Serota, has chaired meetings with disaffected classical music and opera bosses, 'but we need to know that they're listening'.
Gilhooly made Wigmore Hall Arts Council-proof by launching a 'director's fund' last year; the aim was to reach £10 million in pledged donations by 2027, but that target has already been met. 'I didn't expect that in a year,' Gilhooly says modestly. 'It's just good luck and hard work, I suppose, and wonderful donors, who really believe in the place, because it's not an easy time to fundraise. We're in a position to move on from public funding. Others are not.' His new target is to make the director's fund worth £30 million.
As well as celebrating financial independence, Gilhooly talks about the Wigmore's 125th anniversary season to be marked next year and he insists that he is more excited than ever despite having had the top job for 20 years. 'The scope of the season is so different. There's an African concert series, there's a Cuban, Brazilian focus,' he says. 'You've got the great artists of the world, they're all here.' He has also programmed a two-week festival next May for the anniversary, which has 'everything from Lise Davidsen, who's one of the great sopranos of our time, to an evening of Stockhausen, which people wouldn't expect. The repertoire is so diverse – this is not just a house of old Vienna of Schubert, Mozart and Haydn'.
Other starry names announced include Errollyn Warren, Master of the King's Music, four of the celebrated Kanneh-Mason siblings, Mitsuko Uchida and Stephen Hough. Meanwhile, Simon Russell Beale will bring Claude Debussy's life to stage with acclaimed pianist Lucy Parham and Mary Beard is to narrate an International Women's Day programme.
He has also raised £500,000 to underpin the Wigmore's popular £5 ticket for under 35s scheme which, since it was launched a decade ago, has seen 200,000 take advantage of it. It has had the effect of bringing down the average age of concert-goers, as well as being an investment in the Wigmore's future: one couple who would not have been able to afford to see concerts without the hefty discount have now got high-paying jobs and are donating £50,000 a year to the hall. 'It has transformed the audience. And I think it's one of the reasons fundraising is doing so well, because it's encouraging the established audience to really embrace that and to give as they see that there is a future.'
While the Wigmore may have had something of a stuffy reputation before Gilhooly took over in 2005, he has steadfastly maintained its high-class output without resorting to trendy bandwagon-jumping that some other venues have tried. 'Absolutely no gimmicks: that was instilled in me by my predecessor, William Lyne. No gimmicks, no circus tricks. That was his only advice,' says Gilhooly. 'And he was right. Let the music speak for itself. Which is, again, my issue with public funding… We go back several hundred years [in terms of repertoire], and we're commissioning right up to yesterday, and the cross section of artists is huge. So why not cherish that? And why not cherish other people? The South Bank has a niche – cherish that. The Royal Shakespeare Company has a niche – cherish that. But the thing is, we all have to look the same under these things.'
He adds: 'This is where great artists come to earn their credentials. This is where we unapologetically put on difficult repertoire. That will not change, but the breadth of repertoire has changed, and how you define difficult repertoire has changed.'
The Wigmore works closely with both BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM to broaden its audiences and, unlike many in the classical world, Gilhooly does not despair at the fall in radio audiences in recent years. 'People are saying it's not the same as what it used to be in – it's just fine. There are millions of people listening to Classic FM, there are millions of people listening to Radio 3. And Haydn would never have imagined that we would be beaming his string quartets from London across the world to millions of people via radio or digital,' he says. 'It is astonishing, but there's work to be done, and far more people we're never going to convert the whole world.' Instead, he reckons that about 10 per cent of the population Brits are 'interested vaguely in what we do', and his job is to get them in with so many competing demands on their time and attention.
Gilhooly has also been heartened by the Labour Government's warm words about the importance of music education in schools. 'They seem to get the fact that it is the universal right of every child and every citizen to have that access. But if they don't, there's only so much we can do. If they don't fix it in the classroom we can't fix it because we can reach hundreds of thousands collectively as orchestras, opera houses, theater but then there are millions disenfranchised, unless you get to them in those early years,' he warns. 'It's just essential for the curriculum that people know Bach came before Beethoven. And that you don't have to read music to love music, but that they're not frightened of it. Literacy is part of the curriculum, and music literacy should be part of it too.'
Gilhooly says that his childhood in Limerick was a 'typical Irish Catholic upbringing'. Ireland in the 1970s was not a wealthy country. 'We did not live in poverty, but there was a lot of it around,' he says. When he started going to concerts, in the late 1980s, they were at the local Protestant school and church, and 'it was actually an issue that I was going to these concerts for some people. My parents were very enlightened. And I owe them a lot, really'.
After graduating with a degree in history and political science from University College Dublin, Gilhooly worked as a tutor and in the university's buildings department, where he was house manager for the opening of the O'Reilly Hall concert venue. Then came a stint as manager of the Harrogate International Centre in North Yorkshire and a short spell at the Excel in London's Docklands before moving to the Wigmore in 2000.
He and his siblings all trained as singers. So, does he ever sing these days? 'Absolutely not,' he instantly replies. 'I hear it here at such a standard it's enough to shame you. I don't regret anything. If I studied music all my life I wouldn't be doing my job. I'm glad I didn't take it professionally.'
David Lyne spent 46 years at Wigmore Hall, 37 of which as director. As he enters his third decade running the place, Gilhooly is inevitably thinking about how his own tenure will last. 'I'll have to go at some point, and I don't want to die in the job,' he says. 'I'll go on for a while yet, but hopefully if I run out of steam, I think I'm self aware enough to know when it's time to go. But there's road to run, and there are things to be done, because I want to get to that £30 million target.' Few would bet against him succeeding.