From one city of song to another

The tradition of London's Wigmore Hall should be challenged as well as respected, its Limerick-born artistic director tells Arminta Wallace.

'Coughing," reads a discreetly placed paragraph at the top of the first page of the lunchtime concert programme for London's Wigmore Hall, "can be very disturbing for both the artists and for other members of the audience. Please suppress any coughing as much as possible. Cough lozenges are on sale in the foyer or may be obtained from the ushers. . ."

The next paragraph deals gently, but firmly, with mobile phones. And at the bottom of the page a line in bold print requests that it - the page, that is - should not be turned "until the song and its accompaniment have ended".

Fussy? Perhaps - but refreshingly forthright. On the May Bank Holiday Monday the lunchtime recital - by French soprano Véronique Gens and pianist Susan Manoff - is not only playing to a packed Wigmore Hall, but is being beamed live, courtesy of BBC Radio Three, to a quarter of a million people. On the musical menu, song settings by Fauré, Duparc and Hahn of poems by, among others, Baudelaire, Gautier and Verlaine - none of which, presumably, would be enhanced by the sound of grimly determined page-rustling.

In the event, not so much as a renegade crinkle disturbs the elegance of the recital, and the audience spills happily back out on to Wigmore Street, yards from the shop-till-you-drop mayhem of a sunny summer's afternoon on Oxford Street and environs.

"We can promote 50 to 60 song recitals a year here and sell out - even on a bank holiday," says the hall's director, John Gilhooly, as he ushers me through a warren of corridors and stairways into a tiny, cosy office perched on the top floor of the building next door. "I've just come back from New York, and two weeks ago I was in Paris, and every music manager and director tells me that song is difficult to promote in other international cities. But people still want to come here."

Limerick-born Gilhooly, who looks even younger than his 33 years, recently made it on to Time Out's list of the Top 100 Movers, Shakers and Opinion- Makers for London, which described him as "one of the most influential people in classical music". If anything, this may be understating the case.

As head honcho at the Wigmore, he's in charge of some 400 concerts a year. During his time at the venue, he has overseen a multi-million-pound refurbishment operation and completely restructured the hall's finances. A daunting task - but Gilhooly gives the impression of a man who is having the time of his life.

"It's great," he says, with a grin. "I've been here so long now I feel at ease. I suppose it is a lot of responsibility, but when you're doing it, you just do it. It's a great music city, London, though slightly overcrowded. It's difficult for orchestras here, for instance."

But not, apparently, a difficult environment for an Irishman? He chuckles softly.

"There's an Irish lady here at the Wigmore called Paula Best, who has been here for 20 years," he says. "She's the archivist and publications manager, and she's a harpsichordist. She's central to the whole operation. But, obviously, having another Irish person here is wonderful for me."

GROWING UP in Limerick, he adds, gave him the perfect musical grounding for a job such as this. "We had a great musical tradition. Plenty of song, plenty of chamber music and plenty of opera. The concerts put on by John Ruddock were a major part of that; and as for singers, Suzanne Murphy is a local hero."

Gilhooly took singing lessons himself for many years.

"I was a bit lazy," he admits. "I don't think I ever had huge ambitions to be a professional singer, though there are singers in my family - my brother, Owen, is a baritone."

After studying history and politics at UCD, he got a job at the college's O'Reilly Hall and discovered his real gift was for arts administration. He was general manager at Harrogate International Conference Centre for three years, then worked on a £300 million project in London's Docklands. When the chief executive job came up at Wigmore Hall, he had reached the ripe old age of 27.

"I thought I'd just go for it, to see what happened," he says. What happened was that after five years as chief executive at the Wigmore, he was, last year, appointed artistic director into the bargain. In this capacity he has just unveiled his programme for 2006-2007, a chunky 50-page brochure which seems to have stellar names on every page.

Stellar names, of course, are nothing new at the Wigmore.

"Walking through the hall at night, you can feel the ghosts lingering because so many of the great names have come through here," Gilhooly says. "Jacqueline du Pré, Felicity Lott, the Amadeus Quartet. Cecilia Bartoli made her debut here before anybody knew who she was. András Schiff performed The Goldberg Variations in 1978 and has been performing here ever since. Every major international star you can think of has been through the hall, and many keep coming back."

For Gilhooly, the Wigmore's sense of tradition is something to be proud of, but also something to be challenged.

"The perception is that we don't do contemporary music at the Wigmore," he says. "In fact, if you go back through the records, we've had hundreds of premieres here over the years. But for some reason, critics and journalists don't acknowledge it."

Next season, he says, they'll have to. In the autumn, the hall will celebrate the 80th birthday of Hungarian composer György Kurtág with a series of three concerts.

"He's one of our greatest contemporary composers," says Gilhooly. "Incredible, mind-blowing music - and he makes very few public appearances. To have him here is an important statement."

ANOTHER AUTUMN series will be devoted to the string quartet and will include the world premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies's Quartet No 9. And come December, it will be time to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten with a festival of chamber music and song.

"Every concert over the four-day Britten festival features a work which was originally premiered here," says Gilhooly. "So many artists have rearranged their schedules to take part that I couldn't believe it. To start with, we've got four tenors: Philip Langridge, Ian Bostridge, John Mark Ainsley and Mark Padmore.

"We've got to be very careful of that balance between the familiar and the new. If we don't sell enough tickets, we're in serious trouble. We get 10 per cent from the Arts Council and £20,000 (€29,300) from the local authority. It's nothing. We need £800,000 a year in fundraising alone to underwrite our concerts - so you can't scare the horses too much.

"But equally, I'm not letting anybody off. We would never have had a three-gig series of contemporary music concerts in the past, or a Britten festival as ambitious as this one."

Selling tickets, as noted above, doesn't appear to be a problem for the Wigmore. This is partly because the hall's international reputation acts as a kind of quality-control mark, but is also, according to Gilhooly, the result of a dedicated and determined education programme.

"We're everywhere," he says. "We're in businesses, schools, we work in deprived areas in Westminster, we go nationally. Five years ago, 4,000 people participated in our education programme; this year, 16,000 people will take part - and it will continue to grow. It's a huge part of what we do. For our monthly under-fives events, we have queues all the way down Wigmore Street and the foyer is full of pushchairs."

It is, perhaps, this focus on future audience development which allows Gilhooly to be so relaxed about the age demographic of current audiences at the hall.

"You have the grey hair, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that," he says. "You always will. When you've reared your family, when you stop working, when you've got more disposable income, you go to concerts. I heard the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonnen, talk about this two weeks ago in Stockholm. Thirty years ago, he was told that the symphony was dead. People are always saying chamber music is dead."

At the end of the lunchtime recital, the buzz in the auditorium tells quite another story. The woman sitting on my right announces that, with her soul suitably nourished, she is off to treat her body to a spot of retail therapy. A merry band of men and women just inside the entrance is busy devising a plan to demolish the contents of a local wine bar. At the Wigmore Hall, it seems, music is still very much the food of life.

The Wigmore at home: top CDs

With air fares approaching rock bottom and ticket prices at Wigmore Hall eminently reasonable (they depend on the artist, but top-notch seats for a forthcoming recital by the tenor, Jonas Kaufman, for example, will set you back about €35), there's really no excuse for not getting online and making a booking.

For those who'd like to sample the kind of fare on offer before leaving the armchair, a range of recital CDs called Wigmore Hall Live should do the trick. So far, 10 have been released, including Margaret Price singing Mahler and Strauss, Peter Schrier and Andras Schiff performing Schubert, the Arditti Quartet playing works by Nancarrow, Ligeti and Dutilleux, and the Academy of Ancient Music with a programme of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. All were recorded within the Wigmore's famed acoustics and are available online from www.wigmore-hall.org.uk, priced £9.99 each.