Qualla: Wigmore Hall

Wigmore Hall: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Jeffrey, CC BY-SA 2.0. The opening notes of Schubert's Die schoene Muellerin sound different in different rooms. They have a different colour at the Concertgebouw than at Carnegie. But musicians who have played all the great chamber halls of Europe tend, when asked, to put a small 545-seat hall behind a former piano showroom on Wigmore Street near the top of their list. The reason is the room itself. The acoustics at Wigmore Hall are - by general agreement among the people who would know - among the finest in Europe. Carl Bechstein commissioned the room in 1899 to attach his piano showroom to an event that demonstrated his instruments. The showroom is long gone. The room remains, hosting more than five hundred concerts a year and recording one Monday lunchtime concert weekly for BBC Radio 3.

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Image: Philip Jeffrey | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigmore Hall: A German Piano Maker's Showroom

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0. In the late nineteenth century, the German firm of C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik was one of the three or four greatest piano manufacturers in the world. Their London showroom on Wigmore Street needed something more than display models could provide; it needed a hall where artists...

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Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke | CC BY 3.0

Wigmore Hall: The Soul of Music

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. Above the small stage, a cupola depicts the Soul of Music. The mural was designed by Gerald Moira, who later became principal of the Edinburgh College of Art, and executed by the sculptor Frank Lynn Jenkins. The hall itself follows a Renaissance style - alabaster and marble walls...

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigmore Hall: Benjamin Britten's Hall

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Of all the composers who shaped Wigmore Hall's twentieth-century identity, Benjamin Britten was the closest. His Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings premiered here. So did his Second String Quartet, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. Excerpts ...

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Image: Anthony O'Neil | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigmore Hall: Where Careers Are Made

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Russ London -- (Russ London), CC BY-SA 2.5. The list of musicians who have performed at Wigmore reads like a directory of twentieth-century chamber music. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Angeles, Sergey Prokofiev, Shura Cherkassky, Paul Hindemith, Andres Segovia, Francis Poulenc. Bartok's six string quartets all had...

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Image: Russ London -- (Russ London) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Wigmore Hall: Beyond the Concert

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony O'Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Since 1994 the hall has run a learning programme that hosts about six hundred events a year with nearly thirty thousand visits. It includes a partnership called Music for Life for people living with dementia, projects with hospital schools, sessions with women and children at the...

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Image: Anthony O'Neil | CC BY-SA 2.0