Wigmore Hall's principled stand over public funding is music to my ears

The Guardian

29-03-2025

The news that Wigmore Hall in London is to turn its back on an annual subsidy of £345,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), after a successful campaign to raise £10m from individuals and the private sector, is almost as beautiful to my ears as the last thing I heard there, which was the Dunedin Consort playing Henry Purcell.
Its director, John Gilhooly, is surely right to free his institution from the Let's Create strategy, which informs all ACE's funding decisions, linking subsidies to onerous outreach work rather than to excellence in performance. Such organisations shouldn't have to do what is properly the work of the government, and perhaps the Wigmore's decision is the start of resistance to this. I certainly hope so.
On the face of it, the Wiggy, which specialises in chamber and early music, seems the opposite of radical. Its cloakroom and old-fashioned, over-lit basement restaurant always remind me of the Sheffield City Hall I knew as a child; I love it and think of it as a safe space, but whenever I'm there, I spend most of my time worrying that I'll cough, thus incurring the disapproval of members of its crazily attentive and committed audience. But hey, appearances can be deceptive. The revolution will not be televised, but it may accompanied by a lute and a soaring tenor voice.
Like Queen Elizabeth II, who owned quite a lot of it, I sometimes dream of retiring to the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire. Unknown to many, it unfolds before you, magical and secret, its incomparable brown-greenness somehow always tipped with gold even on a grey day. Tolkien went to Stonyhurst College, which is close to the Ribble, one of two rivers that flow through it, and once you've seen it with your own eyes, you know there's no doubting this was the inspiration for Middle-earth.
In Dunsop Bridge, a tiny village bordered only by fells, we wandered into St Hubert's, a Catholic church designed by Edward Pugin for the Towneley family in 1865. A notice informed us that the Towneleys funded the building with the winnings of their racehorse, Kettledrum, and, sure enough, high on the painted roof of the apse, we found the thoroughbred, as glossy and brown as a conker. God moves in mysterious ways, and it seems he may have played his part in the last-minute faltering of the favourite at the 1861 Epsom Derby, a drama that allowed Kettledrum to win by a length.
Is it my imagination, or is the third season of The White Lotus receiving a level of attention the first two did not? On social media, there's no escape from the blond bob of Leslie Bibb, who plays the (possibly) Republican Kate; any minute now, Aimee Lou Wood's much-discussed, natural sticky-out teeth will surely get their own show (Wood stars as Chelsea, the astrology-loving British girlfriend of the bleakly irascible Rick).
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The chatter! Even the philosophers are at it. Kathleen Stock, late of Sussex University, believes that The White Lotus's creator, Mike White, has been reading the French novelist Michel Houellebecq on holiday, with the result – excellent and subtle, in her eyes – that viewers can 'vicariously enjoy the fruits of hyper-liberalism as well as its poisons'.
Apparently, those of us who are feeling slightly guilty about how much we look forward to the series can relax (maybe with a frangipane-scented candle). The bitching, the bikinis and the dubious sex are trailed by the kind of heavy subtext that – if it were a person – would stay in the shade and wear a chore jacket from Folk.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist