John Gilhooly: ‘I stand in the foyer every night. You learn a lot by just chatting to your public’

John Gilhooly has just been to see Whyte Recital Hall, Dublin’s newest music venue, at the redesigned Royal Irish Academy of Music. When the hall opens next month, it will be with a festival of music featuring artists from the 2023-24 season at Wigmore Hall, the UK’s leading venue for chamber music, where Gilhooly, who turned 50 this month, is artistic and executive director.

How he got to run the 122-year-old, 552-seat London venue, which he justifiably calls one of the great concert halls of the world, goes back to Limerick, to the kind of musical exposure he had as a child, and to his upbringing in Castleconnell.

[ First Look: Royal Irish Academy of Music unveils €25m addition to its Georgian Dublin home ]

Limerick, Gilhooly says, was very musical. He name-checks three music teachers. “Two very good local choir mistresses, Nuala Egan and Theresa Jones,” – the latter was “a really good contralto” – and Jean Holmes, “a mezzo who essentially started the whole family’s formal training: we all trained as singers.”

Beyond that there was the intrepid music promoter John Ruddock. “I was in Ardscoil Rís, which was a very Catholic school. And his school was next door.” Ruddock was headmaster of Villiers School. “Later he promoted at the University of Limerick. I can remember my mother giving me money to go. And, when I was 13 or 14, hearing András Schiff, the Takács Quartet, people of that calibre. András Schiff remembers me from back then. And I certainly remember him!” Gilhooly says.

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He studied history and political science at University College Dublin and singing with Veronica Dunne at what was then Dublin Institute of Technology. “In her I saw an impresario as well as a teacher. She was setting up her competition, the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition; she was raising money. She would just tell you everything.”

Gilhooly also worked at UCD, tutoring in history and working in the buildings department. He was house manager for the opening of O’Reilly Hall. “Just in charge of the operations, nothing more. But I can remember the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn, soprano Suzanne Murphy. I remember it very well.”

He is matter-of-fact about his career moves: to Harrogate, in North Yorkshire (“conferencing, exhibitions, a wonderful concert hall, lots of recitals, lots of chamber music”); to the ExCel, in London’s docklands (“at that time it was still a building site. The business side there was very useful”); and then Wigmore Hall, which sells 200,000 tickets a year, and whose government support amounts to just 3 per cent of turnover. Gilhooly took up the number-two position in December 2000; the main job came up four years later.

“What you don’t realise is how demanding, how political, how difficult, how all-consuming it is. And it became a very different job, of course. Fundraising is a huge part of what we do now. At that stage I would have seen it as running a hall with music as part of it,” Gilhooly explains.

Since 2010 he has also been chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society, the London-based organisation that commissioned Beethoven’s Choral Symphony back in 1823. He sees the role as an enhancement of what he was already doing in the UK. “I have this national role, where I’m tied into everything that is going on, in halls and orchestra and schools and all the rest. And that’s very useful.”

If I say something to the Arts Council of England, like Bach was a colossus and that his achievements represent some of the greatest triumphs of human imagination and creativity, they would tell me to shut up

He did regret giving up the singing, Gilhooly says, until his new job brought home to him the full complexities of musical careers – “the stamina, what goes on behind the scenes, in terms of people’s lives and what they have to sacrifice. Their ups and downs, artistically”. Part of his job, he says, “is knowing when to be there for them and knowing when to pull back, or just saying, maybe, take a year off. Also not to introduce somebody too soon. Because you can do a lot of harm.”

Joy, not harm, was what the Wigmore Hall delivered during the pandemic. “Covid was hard. Because we kept going. Mentally, I didn’t find it hard. But, physically, I think I’m still feeling it. We worked throughout those two years. We broadcast every day from the empty hall. It was just me, a radio announcer or a streaming announcer, the artist, and technicians backstage.

“We had to come in through different entrances. We were almost refused permission to have one or two people on stage by Downing Street – when they were having parties, it transpired.” Gilhooly is clearly haunted by the abuse of power that was involved. He later describes the treatment of classical music in the UK as “cultural vandalism” and contrasts the cutbacks to arts funding in London with “the money wasted on PPE that’s still sitting in warehouses”.

The Wigmore is a busy place. “There are 550 concerts a year and then several hundred learning events – so sometimes three events a day. We stopped at the end of July, and we had been going since September. Literally, since the queen died [in September 2022], we’ve had 500 concerts. And it feels like ancient history,” Gilhooly says.

“We kept going the night she died, because we had a programme of royal funeral music. It just happened to be! And we also had a Fauré Requiem that week, so we only closed on the day of the funeral.”

More impressive than the number of events is the fact that “it’s 98 per cent own promotions”.

“That wasn’t the case 20 years ago. We’ve pushed out hires, very often because there were people hiring the hall for a debut that probably shouldn’t have been there,” Gilhooly says. They have made up the shortfall by fundraising. “We bring in £4 million” – about €4.5 million – “in box office and £3 million in fundraising.”

Gihooly points out that, after the BBC, the Wigmore is also “the largest commissioner of new music now in the UK”. The hall also does outreach events “for some of the most marginalised people in society, people living with dementia, refugees, prisoners”. But, he adds: “If I say something to the Arts Council of England, like Bach was a colossus and that his achievements represent some of the greatest triumphs of human imagination and creativity, they would tell me to shut up, because it’s irrelevant, and it’s certainly not welcome.

“There is, rightly, a huge emphasis on diversity. But unless they fix music in the classrooms, unless you get to the five- or six-year olds, like I was got to in Limerick, you won’t have diverse audiences in 20 years.” Gilhooly believes music education is in a sorry state on both sides of the Irish Sea. There are “millions of disenfranchised children” in Britain, he says, “just as there are hundreds of thousands [in Ireland]”.

The Wigmore is building an endowment. “We’re using my 50th as an excuse to talk about the next 50 years. There’s several million pledged towards a fund that we will talk about later in the year,” Gilhooly says.

He programmes across multiple years. The 2023-24 season was published in March, all 11 months of it. “The year after is ready to go. So, generally, I’m looking two or three seasons ahead. And you’re keeping an eye on three seasons so that there’s no duplication over the seasons and that you’re covering different themes.”

Gilhooly says that “the biggest audience, and the youngest, is for solo piano – string quartet if it’s difficult, Bartók, late Beethoven, Shostakovich; that’s where youngsters are coming”.

“I stand in the foyer every night. You learn a lot by just chatting to your public... When people complain, it’s never about price. It’s because you haven’t given them what they want.”

He calls Whyte Recital Hall, at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, a great asset. “Dublin needs a proper chamber hall. The fact that the artists who are coming in internationally are staying to teach, that’s a big plus. That’s wonderful for the students, for the city. You have a 300-seat space now for this intimate music-making. If Dublin has it, the nation has it.”

The Wigmore Hall Festival includes performances by Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss, Stephen Hough, the Schumann Quartet, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Regula Mühlemann; it is at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin 2, from Tuesday, September 5th, to Thursday, September 28th