Wigmore Hall launches director’s fund
Florence Lockheart
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The venue revealed details of the new fund alongside announcement of its 2024-25 season
The Wigmore Hall has today announced its upcoming 550-concert season running from September 2024 to July 2025, alongside the launch of its Director’s Fund. The new fund aims to make the Hall completely self-sufficient and ‘invest in future generations of artists at every stage of their career’.
The Hall describes the fund, which has already received pledges totalling £7 million, as it’s ‘most ambitious investment in its future’ which will be used for ‘innovative independent programming and an uncompromising quality of experience’. It was announced alongside an ambitious upcoming season presenting more than 30 world and UK premières.
John Gilhooly, the venue’s artistic and executive director, said: ‘After a challenging post-pandemic period, I am pleased that ticket sales increased 28% over the past season. Audiences have now exceeded pre-pandemic levels, the highest in the 123-year history of the hall. It is against this backdrop that we are launching the Director’s Fund, Wigmore Hall’s statement of intent to secure the future of chamber music in the UK and for the hall itself… We will continue to support musicians and to present a classical music programme of a calibre, scale and diversity that our audiences from around the world have come to love and expect.’
Alongside a nine-concert celebration of the centenary of the birth of composer Gabriel Fauré in 2025, the upcoming season will see residencies by violinist Vilde Frang, cellist Gary Hoffman, guitarist Sean Shibe, tenor Nicky Spence and oboist Olivier Stankiewicz, plus Solomon’s Knot, Wigmore Hall’s baroque ensemble in residence.
The Hall will present a packed schedule of instrumental and song concerts featuring performers including cellists Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Gautier Capuçon, violinist Hilary Hahn and pianists Isata Kanneh-Mason, Rudolf Buchbinder, Martha Argerich and Boris Giltburg, who becomes the latest pianist to undertake a complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle at Wigmore Hall, across eight concerts.
Outside of classical music, the Hall will host debut performances from jazz pianist, composer, bandleader and educator Emmet Cohen and his Trio and jazz pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa alongside the return of sarod player Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and his sons.
Tickets for Wigmore Hall’s 2024-25 season will be available from 30 April 2024 at the Wigmore Hall website.
