Page 107 - RPS Awards 2023 Coverage Book

Classical music, Gilhooly argues, is caught in a double bind: its funding depends on it

reaching out to ever more diverse audiences, while the government holding the purse

strings is unwilling to nurture those future audiences through music education.

“There’s a problem at a political level: no one wants to engage,” says Gilhooly, 49, who

has been at the helm of the Wigmore Hall for nearly 18 years. “Classical music is all
over the place. There’s just no joined-up thinking. Colleagues I trust are really, really

worried — not about themselves, but about the whole model.”

Some have suggested that the Arts Council’s recent cuts to opera funding were driven by

a crusade against “highbrow music”. Would Gilhooly go that far? “I think,” he says

carefully, “we need to be reassured that that’s not the attitude, not the agenda.”

Dialogue between politics and the arts — something Gilhooly returns to again and again

— was notably lacking in last year’s round of Arts Council cuts, which stripped English

National Opera and the Britten Sinfonia of all their funding. Glyndebourne and Welsh

National Opera lost 50 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. Gilhooly points out that
much of the problem lies with a one-size-fits-all strategy that judges a local youth

theatre’s funding application by the same criteria as a centre of excellence such as the

Wigmore Hall. In broad terms, bringing in new and more diverse audiences is now the

priority in allocating cash.

“I worry we’ll all end up looking the same, everybody having to do the same list of

things. We’re talking so much about outcomes that we’re not always talking about great

art. Great musicians are elite because they’re so good — that doesn’t make what they do
elitist. Outreach shouldn’t come at the expense of the core. In trying to create access at

any cost we’re forgetting that.”

Gilhooly sees everything that the Wigmore Hall does (it receives only 3 per cent of its

funding from the Arts Council) as education — on stage and off. Visit the hall during the

week and you’re as likely to find a dementia workshop or a children’s event as a

chamber recital. Post-pandemic audiences are also younger — “we’re seeing under-35s

from every postcode in Greater London” — with £5 tickets drawing newcomers who