Wigmore Hall marked 125 years with a fourteen-day festival of twenty-four concerts, opened by a reimagining of its inaugural programme of 1901.
Wigmore Hall marked its 125th anniversary with a festival of 24 concerts at Wigmore Hall in Marylebone, from Monday 25 May to Sunday 7 June 2026.
The Bechstein piano firm built the hall beside its showrooms in 1901. It opened with gala concerts on 31 May and 1 June 1901, with Ferruccio Busoni, Eugène Ysaÿe and Vladimir de Pachmann on the bill.
The First World War closed it. Debenhams bought the hall in 1916 after the firm’s assets were seized, and it reopened in 1917 as Wigmore Hall. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears later gave frequent recitals there, and many of Britten’s works were first heard in it.
The hall seats about 550 and programmed nearly 600 events in the anniversary season under its director, John Gilhooly. The festival centred on 31 May, the date of the first concert.
The opening gala revisited the 1901 programme, from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 to Brahms’s Paganini Variations. Thomas Adès, Alina Ibragimova, Cédric Tiberghien, Louise Alder and Joseph Middleton performed, and Adès gave the world première of his piano arrangement of Vesper.
The evening also launched There Is Sweet Music Here, Julia Boyd’s history of the hall.