“I felt on top of the world. He’s only 21 years old. It’s astonishing.” I meet John Gilhooly the day after watching pianist Yunchan Lim’s second recital of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Wigmore Hall in under 24 hours. Both played to packed houses. The Artistic and Executive Director is riding a high, having recently announced the hall’s 125th anniversary season. We’re each clutching season brochures in his eyrie of an office, but can’t resist reflecting on Yunchan.
The softly-spoken Gilhooly clearly feels protective about the South Korean, in 2022 the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. “He’s been very well minded by his agent and his teacher, who are involved in all the dialogue. I won’t say what’s coming next, but he’ll be with us quite a lot. We have a five year strategy that works just like we did with Igor Levit.”
Yunchan gave his first Wigmore recital in January 2023, the resulting live-stream clocking up 1.2 million views. “Usually I don’t automatically book competition winners, but there was just something about him and I thought, ‘Let’s give it a go.’ It was an exceptional recital. But we consciously didn’t stream the other night. It was a huge test of his stamina to play the Goldbergs twice within not quite 24 hours. And refreshing to hear that the interpretations were different over two days. It’s a space that you grow into – you’ve got to learn how to control the piano in that space because it’s got a very generous acoustic – it’s a Steinway in a 550-seater. All that takes a while to gauge.”
It ended up being not two, but four Goldbergs that week, with Vîkingur Ólafsson changing his advertised programme late in the day. “I didn’t expect four Goldbergs in a week,” Gilhooly shrugs, “but that’s fine. People can compare and contrast. They’re both wonderful in different ways. I don’t like the idea of different factions in the piano world. We shouldn’t be pulling anybody down.”
When creating a season, is avoiding programme clashes a priority? “The nightmare is being offered six Death and the Maidens. You have to choose two. You put on one in September, one in July and tell everybody else to start again and they get very cross. But we’re here for the public benefit and, as wonderful as it is hearing Death and the Maiden or the Schubert Quintet or Schubert D960 – it’s always Schubert! – you need balance.” He grins, “But I wasn’t going to turn around and tell Vikingur he couldn’t come!”
Wigmore Hall is unique. I can’t think of another city with a hall so devoted to chamber music and song. Larger venues have smaller halls which put on occasional recitals, but not every day, certainly not two or three recitals some days. As well as being the hall’s 125th anniversary season, it is also 20 years since Gilhooly took up his post.
“I can’t believe how fast it’s gone. I was very young, of course, so that’s probably helped my longevity. I had to grow into the job. But I’m not going anywhere for a while, that’s for certain, because it’s heaven. I put my heart and soul into it but it comes at a cost, a personal cost,” he reflects. “I’m here a lot. I try to pull back when I can and I feel guilty when I escape a concert, but sometimes if you’ve heard ten in a row, you’re not going to listen properly on the eleventh night. You know that too, as a critic. Netflix beckons, White Lotus calls, although it’s not as good this time around…”
I ask Gilhooly how running the hall has changed. His answer is immediate. “Fundraising. We were almost bankrupt 20 years ago, with a deficit of a quarter of a million. There were no assets. We didn’t own the hall. We didn’t own the long term lease. We didn’t have a fundraising strategy. We didn’t have a proper marketing strategy. I reckon we’ve raised about £80 million in fundraising during my tenure. And it costs £8.5m a year to run the place now. Soon it’ll cost nine, I suspect, so we need £3 million every year in fundraising to underpin the season.”
A huge recent success was the news that the Director’s Fund, launched last year to make the hall financially self-sustaining, has already reached its £10m target, securing its independent future. As a result, Wigmore Hall will voluntarily withdraw from Arts Council England’s portfolio. “It’s not an attack on ACE,” Gilhooly told the audience at the season launch. “It’s a separation. I don’t think it’s a divorce.”
However, the announcement drew an extraordinary response from a clearly rattled ACE Chair, Sir Nicholas Serota, who argued in an open letter that the hall’s achievement “must not be used as an argument against public funding for culture”. How does Gilhooly view that response?
“We never suggested an end to public money or nationwide public investment in culture and it seems strange that ACE suggested that we did. We’ve been nothing more than balanced about this and people should look at my Telegraph interview or watch the season launch where I speak for half an hour on the subject to see what was said. More importantly, we are not an enormously privileged or very rich organisation, and we operated on a hand-to-mouth basis until relatively recently. Through its quarterly monitoring in the past decade, ACE knows this very well.
“It’s taken 20 years of fundraising strategy and hard work to get us to this position,” Gilhooly emphasises. “A quick glance at any of my public statements or speeches in recent years highlights that we are totally in favour of DEI and wider community outreach. We have a sector-leading track record in these areas, as well as programming the most diverse artistic series in all four nations of the UK.”
Matthias Goerne and Maria João Pires perform Schubert on 9th September to launch the anniversary season. The Takacs Quartet celebrating their 50th anniversary will be special for Gilhooly, who first heard them as an 11-year old in his native Limerick. It’s easy to pick out favourites – Dame Mitsuko Uchida in late Beethoven, Jakub Józef Orliński, the Elias Quartet doing a complete Beethoven cycle – but my eyes fall on a quite extraordinary few days in late May 2026: Jordi Savall, Alexandre Kantorow, Yunchan Lim, Igor Levit and the Leonkoro Quartet, Asmik Grigorian, Lise Davidsen, Christian Gerhaher. Is Gilhooly trying to bankrupt me?
“This is the anniversary fortnight,” he beams, revealing that a lot of it will be live-streamed. Lise Davidsen’s all-Schubert recital on the anniversary itself (31st May) will be recorded by Decca.
Putting together a season of 600 recitals takes years of planning. “A lot goes on behind the scenes that isn’t acknowledged,” Gilhooly explains. “There’s a huge amount spent on commissioning. We’ve had 1004 commissions since 2005. This thing about the hall being dusty and not a centre for contemporary music? There’s a huge focus on new composers all the time, like the JACK Quartet belting out contemporary music all day long.
“And anybody who thinks that the hall is anti-diversity or anti-community, all they have to do is look at our track record. People come to the African concert series as a point of entry and then they like the place, so they come to a traditional string quartet. There was a packed hall for Ethiopian piano music a few weeks ago. That diaspora who are not used to the Western tradition come to us through their own tradition and then test us out.
“In terms of programming, it’s interesting. Something will sell out in Vienna, but you’ve got to build them up here. Something sells out here, transfers to Paris and nobody goes. We all have different territories but we’re watching what’s happening elsewhere. We talk across Europe. We talk to halls and festivals all over the world. We share successes and failures, which young artists to watch. There’s a massive network and we’re all plugged into the local conservatoires. If very significant talent is coming through, we are alerted.
“Everything is selling exceptionally well, better than ever, but there’s still a little bit of struggle around song recitals, so we’re going to start using surtitles.” Won’t this cause a sharp intake of breath from the purists? “We’re not going to apologise. The audiences are there. They come out for certain singers, but we are doing between 70 and 90 recitals in a given year. That’s not happening in Vienna or Berlin, Paris or New York. So in effect, we’re doing too many, but if we pull back, it could damage the song recital circuit internationally. The trustees are very clear: keep that sacred. So that’s why surtitles will be projected onto the wallpaper.”
There must be nothing more frustrating for a singer than to look out over a sea of heads buried in the texts. “I don’t think surtitles will destroy the experience, so in the next 18 months, you’ll see them being trialled. It’s going to cost a bit, but it’s worth it. Printed texts will still be available and will be online the night before. There is a hunger and increasingly a younger audience for Lied. But of all the things we promote, it’s the hardest.”
When it comes to attracting younger audiences, Gilhooly’s strategy has been simple: make tickets cheap (£5 for Under 35s) or even free. “It’s very expensive,” he confesses. “There’s funding that subsidises it quite a lot. And there’s a new £500,000 grant from the AKO Foundation which will keep the Under 35s scheme going. The Cavatina Chamber Music Trust funds the Under 25s tickets, which are free.
“What’s really interesting is a couple that used to come a lot under the earlier schemes are now working for a big firm in the City and are giving us a huge donation every year, reminding us that ‘you looked after us when we couldn’t afford the tickets and the babysitter’. Now they’re introducing their own children to music. There’s work to be done looking at that constituency because, ten years on, a lot of them have become members – they graduate, they don’t just abandon us. There is a loyalty building up there. They seem to love the place in the way everybody else does. It’s magic.
“You know Britten’s ‘sacred triangle’ of composer, performer and audience? That’s embedded in the very walls here. If I’m having a bad day, you just walk through the empty hall and you can feel the energy of the thousands of concerts shown here.” Little wonder that Gilhooly feels on top of the world.
See all upcoming events at Wigmore Hall.
This article was sponsored by Wigmore Hall.
