we commission up to 20 new works a season.”
Gilhooly knows his audience and is short with knee-jerk journalists and commentators who see grey hair and equate it with dwin- dling interest: “It’s nonsense to say classical music is dying. I’ve attended many funerals and seen the whole Jewish émigré audience disappear, but they’re replaced by others with grey hair, and sometimes no hair, who’ve fed through.” Programming is paramount. Is this the work of a committee? Gilhooly scoffs: “A commit- tee of one.” In 2005 he raised funds to purchase the hall’s lease and free the annual rental to spend on programming. “That’s how this year we’ve got Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim and Karita Mattila.” The insatiable demand for quartets, he claims, is also true of song recitals: “There’s no other hall in the world, not even in the German-speaking territories, that can pro- gramme 70 concerts a year and guarantee 70 per cent sold out. The audience is here, thriv- ing and growing.” The director has never been shy of trying
new strategies, saying: “The record label, Wigmore Hall Live, which I introduced in 2005 thinking it would be a nice little cot- tage industry in the corner, has had a fantastic effect. We sell tens of thousands of some albums in the United States. We have an effective marketing strategy with adverts on the buses and the Tube and in Time Out, which is where you seem to get a younger audience. None of that happened before. We’ve become more visible. I’m constantly out there flying the flag, doing interviews.”
ilhooly trained as a singer (tenor – his younger brother is the baritone Owen Gilhooly), and read history and politics at University College, Dublin, where he spent his spare time man- aging the campus concert hall. This “great, wonderful experience” clearly mapped out his future. We discuss what else might lie ahead, but the most he ventures is the possibility of working for a charity some time in the future. “That’s at least a decade away.” What about a return to Ireland? “I don’t see that as an option,” he sighed.
G
“When you consider the Church and the Government – the two institutions which we once looked to – they’ve both collapsed at the same time. It’s that bad. What was De Valera’s majority party can’t even command 20 per cent of the vote. It’s unheard of. It’s never happened since the foundation of the state. There’s a loss of confidence in the polit- ical system – you feel it as soon as you step off the plane. Whether or not the Church is finished in Ireland, I don’t know, but for some- body who loves it so much, it’s difficult to watch …” We end on this slightly discouraging note. But it occurs to me as I unhook a hire-bike from outside the hall, that I know just the man to sort out Ireland’s problems.
■Rick Jones writes on classical music for The Tablet.
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S PRESSWATCH
‘In hellish tales, the man with power against the demons is always a Catholic priest’
If it is true that “in Rome, going to see an exorcist has become commonplace, like going to see a dentist”, then I think the local bishop should be doing something about it. The unlikely remark came in an interview with Fr Gary Thomas, an American priest on whose experiences Matt Baglio drew for his book The Rite: the making of a modern exorcist. The book is now a film, The Rite, with Anthony Hopkins, coming soon to a cinema near you. The interview was in the National Catholic Register, a paper I seldom see, which seems jolly keen on the subject, running two long pieces on it in three days. Fr Thomas’ scepticism about demonic possession was overcome by his witnessing people “taking on a serpentine appearance and vomiting nails”. This is everyday behaviour in the remnants of Fleet Street, but apparently still makes an impression on the banks of the Tiber. The Register went to the trouble of seeking the opinion of the diocesan exorcist of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who has been at it for 40 years but has seen only two actual possessions. “One confession is worth 100 exorcisms,” he said.
But why has the infernal become so popular in the cinema and on television? Whenever I try to find the late-night news, I stumble across tosh about war in heaven played out in some kind of college, and repeats of a film that I have never been able to keep awake through, called Constantine, about a detective of the preternatural (Keanu Reeves) who has to visit hell. The latter is based on a comic-book, Hellraiser. It seems that the home-knitted myths of comic books easily incorporate ideas about demonic warfare that are knocking around in a post-ecclesial culture. Hellraiser is still going strong, in monthly episodes, after 23 years. In hellish tales for the screen, a notable element is that the man with power against the demons is always a Catholic priest. There is, to be sure, no faith in hell (or in heaven, for that matter), but it is as if the devil himself believes one clause in the Creed, the one about the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Yet the new interest in exorcism
among Catholics can hardly stem entirely from folk who read the Register and miss saying the prayer at the end of Mass, “Holy Michael, Archangel, defend us in the day of battle …” It must in truth derive in large part from the influence of the notions of “spiritual warfare” and deliverance in Pentecostalism (which itself, over the past generation or two, has borne fruit in the charismatic movement in mainstream Churches). Meanwhile, The Times this week went back to the author of The Exorcist, which has sold 13 million since its publication in 1971. William Peter Blatty ruefully complained that its great success spoilt his career as a comedy screenwriter. “I would mention comedy and studio people’s eyes would glaze over,” he said. Mr Blatty is 82 and surprised David Hayles, his interviewer, by saying he looked forward to death. “I have, beyond my faith – I’m a Roman Catholic – had actual experiences that unquestionably are what we speak of as the other side, that have left me without any question that this is a dream world, not the real world at all.”
An amazing tale of death cheated came in the most memorable letter of the week, from Sir Terry Farrell, who wrote to The Sunday Times about his grandfather. Like the American congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he was shot through the head.
While serving in Mesopotamia,
now Iraq, in the First World War, he was helping a wounded comrade when he was shot. The bullet entered his head behind the left ear and exited through his left eye. “He was left for dead … Later, on hearing voices, he managed to walk into an enemy camp of Turks and Germans and so became a PoW. He was put on a cart and taken hundreds of miles to Baghdad, where, being a Catholic, he was turned over to nuns who cared for him with nothing more than bandages and iodine.” A Requiem Mass had been held for him back in Manchester, but he surprised them all at home by returning from the war, and lived to the age of 93.
■ Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
5 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 9
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