There’s a tough journey ahead for the world of live classical music, but a virtual Mass has given Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly his roadmap, he tells Joanna Moorhead

Performance art is in doldrums even its most imaginative practitioners couldn’t have imagined a few months ago, which is why the announcement that, from next week, live concerts will begin again from London’s Wigmore Hall has been hailed as little short of miraculous. So it’s apt, perhaps, that the miracle owes its existence to a Mass broadcast live from St James’s, Spanish Place, in London, which was attended virtually by the Wigmore Hall’s director, John Gilhooly.

“It was Easter Sunday, and the Mass included an organist and a singer – everyone socially distanced, of course,” Gilhooly tells me. “And as I watched it I thought: if they can do it, so can we.”
A few days later, he contacted Radio 3 to see if there was interest, if he could make concerts happen, in broadcasting them live. “I said, we’re going to try this – do you want to be our partner? And they were thrilled – I don’t think anyone had thought about how to bring live music back.”