[NYTimes, 24 December 2000]
The Wigmore Hall: Where the Sound Is as Good as the Musicians
By MICHAEL WHITE
LONDON -- WHEN Londoners talk up their city as the music capital
of the world, their pride is justified, because no other town - not
even Berlin or New York - could claim performances of such persistent
quality and quantity. But festering at the heart of this embarrassment
of riches is an embarrassment that no one boasts about: London's
first-rate music making takes place in distinctly second-rate symphonic
halls. The Royal Albert Hall, a barn with a vast dome, swallows the
sound from the stage before it reaches the audience. The Royal
Festival Hall is dry and unsympathetic to anything that requires
atmosphere. And the Barbican Center is acoustically adequate but
nothing more. Joyless and drab, it occupies an unlovely part of the
financial district, where, after 8 p.m., the streets feel as empty
as a plague zone. No place to cherish.
Slightly north of Oxford Street, though, is a small recital hall that
Londoners do cherish: the Wigmore Hall. It sits discreetly in a
neighborhood traditionally reserved for private medicine. Small
brass plaques whisper the presence of expensive clinics behind Georgian
street facades. Old-fashioned shops sell surgical appliances. There
is something safe, secure and comforting about this part of London.
And with just 550 well- upholstered seats filling its quietly dignified
Edwardian interior, the Wigmore has been comforting audiences and
artists alike for 100 years. Hence its centenary festival, which
has just opened and runs until summer.
The festival brochure, listing some 50 concerts and the musicians
scheduled to appear, explains something about the peculiar pull of
the hall, because most of these performers count as what you might
sentimentally but accurately call Wigmore family. Devoted regulars,
they include Anne Sofie von Otter, Andras Schiff, Andreas Scholl,
Barbara Bonney, Felicity Lott, Leif Ove Andsnes, Ian Bostridge, Joshua
Bell, Steven Isserlis, Peter Schreier. The list goes on. Every one
would tell you, if asked, that he or she enjoyed a special relationship
with the Wigmore; that it was like nowhere else; that it was the
purest pleasure to perform in; that it felt like home.
"It's hard to describe what the Wigmore means to those of us who play
there," says Mr. Isserlis, the cellist. "It has partly to do with
the acoustics - which are perfect, as good as you'll find anywhere
- and partly to do with the intimacy. When you're on stage, the
audience feels incredibly close. The applause hits you in the face
when you walk out there. But there's also a magic about the place,
a sense of being transported back in time, of playing not just to a
living audience but to the ghosts of great performers from the old
days. That could be intimidating, but it's nothing of the sort,
because the Wigmore turns performers into friends. It just feels
right, in a way that so many concert halls don't."
It feels right principally because the Wigmore has the nurturing
enclosure of an old Edwardian clubhouse. This is not a great palace
of culture, built to overwhelm. The box office is tiny, no more than
a cubicle. The backstage rooms are small and lined with fading
photographs of artists like Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Shura
Cherkassky and Arthur Rubinstein, who would not find anything very
different if they came back from the grave to take a second look
around their old haunt.
Things change slowly, including the staff members, who are few in
number but long in service. The audience is tended by Edna, Peggy
and Daphne, who have been checking tickets longer than anyone would
presume to calculate. The handful of administrators have scarcely
known any other life. And presiding over the whole operation is the
reticent but legendary figure of William Lyne, a mild-mannered
Australian who has been the director for 34 years and on the payroll
even longer; he arrived in 1957 on a 12-month leave of absence from
Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"The first thing I did when I arrived in London was come to a recital
at the Wigmore," Mr. Lyne recalls. "Then, a few months later, the
job of assistant manager came up, and I got it. My first responsibility
was the Lotte Lehmann master classes that introduced Janet Baker and
Grace Bumbry to the London public. And I must have enjoyed it,
otherwise I wouldn't still be here."
Still here, he might add, catering like a butler to the eccentricities
and nerves of artists; advising youngsters on stage etiquette or the
chemistry of encores (knowing when enough is enough); and, in spare
moments, organizing one of the most impressive year-round programs
to be found in any European concert hall. For the remarkable thing
is that although the Wigmore preserves the look and feel of an
exquisite cottage industry, it carries weight. Wigmore recitals
count on a resume. This, after all, is where Victoria de los Angeles,
Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig and many others built special
relationships with the British public.
The Wigmore takes its name from its address, Wigmore Street; and that
in turn comes from a castle in Herefordshire, commemorated in an old
print kept backstage because it was given and inscribed to the hall
by Edward Elgar after the premiere of his String Quartet and Piano
Quintet in 1919.
But when the place first opened, in 1901, it had another name:
Bechstein Hall, in recognition of the German piano manufacturer that
built it as a working stage for Bechstein instruments. Since the
showroom was next door, pianos were instantly available for visiting
performers and could be wheeled through onto the stage. Since
Bechstein was the leading piano firm in Europe, still holding off
the threat of Steinway in America, it could afford to do things
properly. So the Wigmore was constructed with no expense spared,
in what the commemorative brochure for the opening concerts called
Renaissance style: in fact, a rather sober English Arts and Crafts
enriched by old Spanish mahogany and red Verona marble.
The most striking aspect of the auditorium, then as now, was a
semicircular recess at the stage end, like the apse in an early
Christian basilica. The canopy of the recess was enlivened with an
allegorical depiction of "the struggle that man willingly endures in
his attempt to catch even a distant echo of the divinity of sound,"
the brochure says. More prosaically, it commends the ventilation
system as "favored by the majority of the great London hospitals,"
allowing the audience "to hear the divinest harmony in a state of
immunity to all unhygienic elements."
The audience at the inaugural recital took home memories of the
violinist Eugene Ysaye and the pianist Ferruccio Busoni playing
Beethoven and Bach. And from that moment, the Wigmore's roll call
of the great and the good rolled ever on. In 1907 Serge Koussevitzky
gave a double-bass recital with what the press called "artistic
taste." And in 1910 Saint-Saens led a small ensemble through a series
of Mozart piano concertos, which were less familiar then to London
audiences than one would like to think. Only a couple of years
earlier, Thomas Beecham had conducted Mozart's "Prague" Symphony at
the Wigmore, attracting enthusiastic reviews for this "delightful
novelty."
Sadly for Bechstein, the delights of its new hall were short-lived.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, German-owned property in London
was confiscated and placed in the hands of a receiver. The Wigmore
was sold and its name changed; its stock of Bechstein pianos was sold
off, too, because, in the patriotic fervor of the times, German
instruments were thought unfit for public enjoyment.
The 1920's, it must be said, were not the Wigmore's golden age.
There were events of substance, but too often there were strange,
mixed programs that reflected the tastes of the time, with music hall
acts like Ernest Newlandsmith, who played the violin in medieval
clothes, and Teresa del Riego, who performed her own compositions
with whistling solos supplied by her brother.
Another problem was that stars came with "supporting artistes," often
debut recitalists, who would eventually give the hall a reputation
as a nursery institution. This brought papered houses and uncertain
quality. Still, the Wigmore can boast throughout its history an
enviable record of discoveries. In 1906 it gave the young Beecham
his conducting debut. In 1923 it presented the violinist Alfredo
Campoli, with his birth certificate on display in the foyer to prove
he was only 16. In 1958 the 15-year-old pianist Daniel Barenboim
pounded through Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata in short pants.
Three years later came the 16- year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pre.
Of all the wunderkinder to have dazzled unsuspecting audiences,
perhaps the most extraordinary was the pianist Solomon, who gave his
farewell recital at the Wigmore at 15.
According to the program in the archives, dated June 5, 1917, Solomon
was "acting on the advice of his many friends . . . to interrupt his
exceptionally brilliant public career and retire from the concert
platform for a considerable time." The reason was to study "undisturbed
by the excitement and fatigue of constant public performances." To
judge by the scale of his farewell, which plowed through Bach,
Scarlatti, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and somebody called
Percy Colston, the fatigue was justified.
Around the 1970's, the whole life of the Wigmore seemed to be bordering
on fatigue. Its nursery function threatened to take over everything
else, with debut recitals dominating the calendar and nothing much
the management could do about it. The hall was simply a space for
hire, with no funds to create and promote its own programs. Worse,
it was faced with competition from the brand new Purcell Room and
Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank.
At this point the mild-mannered Mr. Lyne, sensing a make-or-break
opportunity, seized the initiative, finding the funds to run concert
series of his own and gathering everything that happened in the hall
into the framework of an overall artistic policy.
Gradually he engineered one of the more remarkable quiet revolutions
in the modern history of the British arts. It was Mr. Lyne who put
the Takacs Quartet on the road to fame; who booked the young Andras
Schiff the day after he failed to win the Leeds Piano Competition;
who rescued the moribund career of the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair;
and who was so sure of the potential of another baritone he heard in
Germany that he wrote letters to everyone he could think of, exhorting
them to hear this young man's Wigmore debut. The man was Matthias
Goerne, and when he walked on stage, he was astonished to find the
auditorium full. "Nobody knows me here, " Mr. Goerne said, and he
was right. But Mr. Lyne can be persuasive.
HE also has a loyal audience. There are people who patronize no
concert hall in London except the Wigmore, and who go there night
after night regardless of the program. They are usually on first-name
terms with Edna, Peggy and Daphne. They know the repertory at least
as well as the professional critics, whom they hunt down and bait at
intermissions. A fair number of them are refugees from Nazi Europe,
who for decades were the life and soul of Wigmore song recitals,
turning the standing-room crush bar into something like a Viennese
coffeehouse, although there are others, younger, who go just as often
and are just as fierce in their affection for the place.
Some years ago, the hall sent out a circular to announce that it
would close for 16 months to undergo refurbishment. The circular
invited comments. Within two days there were 450 replies, many
accompanied by despairing, anguished letters. Two days more, and
the despairing letters were in the thousands, mostly saying the same
thing: variations on, "You're shutting down my life for the next 16
months." How many other halls in Britain, Europe or America could
mean that much?
Michael White, formerly the chief music critic of The Independent in
London, is the host of "Opera in Action" on BBC.
Scott Morrison
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