The 100th anniversary of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising has been much marked in the media over the past few days and weeks. But according to John Gilhooly, the Limerick-born director of London’s Wigmore Hall, the real focus of the centenary should not be war and violence, it should be reconciliation, mutual friendship and a shared cultural heritage.

“It’s saying, let’s move on. The past is behind us,” says Gilhooly, whose view is that there is much to celebrate in Irish culture and its impact on the British arts scene.

“Many Irish people have done well here,” he says. “A hundred years of Irish culture gives us an opportunity to celebrate, for example, (Dublin-born) Dame Ann Murray, who has just marked 40 years at Covent Garden showered with roses.” Gilhooly excuses as “an oversight” the failure to include high culture when the President of Ireland attended a Royal Albert Hall concert during a state visit two years ago, as if electrified Irish dancing and pop bands were all that were needed to sum up Irish culture.

The Irish Embassy in London has made amends by approaching Gilhooly this year, and the result is the Irish Culture in Britain Festival, which runs across one evening and four matinees at the Wigmore Hall (from 19 April). It features music both classical and folk, performed mainly by Irish artists and headed by Murray, who will be giving a three-hour masterclass to students from Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy of Music where she once studied, and where she now teaches.