Why hold a song competition at all?
Surely the Hall’s reputation alone is enough to ensure calls to the right agents will secure a steady stream of world-class recitals? Surely the world-wide music-intelligence network, and the world’s record companies, will ensure emerging talent finds its way to Wigmore Street?
Inevitably these factors already influence the Hall’s artistic planning, but for Wigmore’s management there’s a need to go further – to play its own role in identifying and promoting talent. That desire emerges from a range of motives, and for John Gilhooly it’s about one thing above all – building a bridge between the great musical traditions of the past and a healthy, dynamic future for the Hall. “I’m always aware of the need to find new advocates for this highly specialised art,” he says. And there’s a real urgency to his search, as Dr Ralph Kohn of the prize-giving Kohn Foundation explains: “In a previous era great talent very often enjoyed patronage and the personal support of impresarios. This is hardly the case now.”
It’s a point picked up this evening by John Tusa as he entered the auditorium for the first half of this evening’s recitals.
Wigmore Hall’s future depends upon cultivating artists who’ll come here for decades. So there’s no resting on laurels – those photos of Ferrier, Pears and Fischer-Diskeau will need to be accompanied by a new generation of Greats. And let’s not ignore the financial benefits of those relationships either – try booking the world’s great musicians for one-off corporate events, and you’ll probably find you’ll pay more than places where they enjoy regular performances before appreciative audiences.
The very first line of the guidelines issued to jurors at the Song Competition says that the victor should be a singer ‘who can distinguish themselves in a debut recital at Wigmore Hall, ideally within two years’. This is sensible: good for the Hall, and good for the musicians in whose name the Hall was built in the first place. It’s also a matter close to juror Anneke Hogenstijn’s heart: she is, after all, in charge of programming at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and she is becoming increasingly concerned at the dearth of song in young people’s musical education.
Commercially and artistically, then, this competition makes sense. And as the late Clifford Curzon once put it: ‘What greater and more touching pleasure is there in life than giving a young and beautiful talent a little lift in the direction of the stars?’
(LJ)
