The foyer is built of alabaster, with red Verona marble walls. Sicilian marble shapes the stairway, with its balusters of limpid alabaster and its red Verona marble handrail. Mahogany from the forests of San Domingo provides the panelling for the auditorium. The Wigmore Hall was never, perhaps, the firmest friend of the earth. But in its 100 glorious and politically incorrect years, it has been acclaimed as "the epicentre of musical life in the capital" and "the world's most consistent treasure chest of fine performances".
The Wigmore, modestly set between the Chinese medical centres, opticians and Scandinavian designers of Wigmore Street in central London, is the concert hall in which musicians such as Ian Bostridge, Matthias Goerne and Maxim Vengerov have chosen to make their debuts, and where Shura Cherkassky, Tatiana Nikolaeva, Christa Ludwig and Victoria de los Angeles have insisted on taking their farewells. It is almost certainly the only venue where ailing pigeons have been brought in from the street for resuscitation by the management; where regular punters know each other by their seat and row numbers ("Oh, how's E10 today? Haven't seen T22 for quite some time . . . "); and where an esoteric recital of The Lamentations of Jeremiah, by the baroque Bohemian Jan Zelenka, can draw a capacity audience ranging from old ladies doing their knitting (I sat next to one) to between-agers bearing Mango tote bags, and from odoriferous backpackers through lads with chequer-shaved hair to businessmen with shiny black document cases.
The Wigmore Hall is the meeting place for all sorts and conditions of humankind. Most nights, not a ticket is to be had. Yet with the exception of one make-over in 1991-92, the hall has never sought - nor been prevailed upon - to reinvent itself. While the South Bank continues its fever and fret over development plans, while Chris Smith holds his gun to the unsuspecting head of the Victoria & Albert, the Wigmore Hall remains stubbornly true to itself. It looks outward - the BBC's New Generation series of young artists' recitals has recently made its home there - but it never looks neurotically over its shoulder. Why should it?
The reinvention has been going on - but from deep within. The First World War provoked the first repackaging. The Bechstein Hall, which opened in 1901 on the same site, and hosted the likes of Ferruccio Busoni, Eugene Ysaye, Leopold Godowsky, Artur Schnabel, Dame Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso, was wound up, together with its piano showrooms and studios, in 1916. The name did not exactly fit. As the newly christened Wigmore Hall, it was visited by Prokofiev, apparently at 3pm on 17 January 1931, by Janacek in 1926, and by Ethel Smyth - complete with trilby and dog - in 1928. In the 1940s and 1950s, there were appearances by - but, no, it would take up much less space to enumerate those musicians who did not appear at the Wigmore Hall. In any case, the names are really not the point.
But in the mid-1960s, a quiet Australian called William Lyne sidled into the manager's office. He was so quiet that the Arts Council thought he wouldn't be any trouble. But he was. Ten years later, he was in command. And he quietly began working on it from within. I first met - properly met - Lyne among the reed and rushes of the sea lough at Ferrycarrig, County Wexford. He was rooting around - very quietly - for herons and sandpipers, with field glasses and an old camera. He insisted he wasn't a bird-watcher: he just loved birds. His number-one Desert Island Disc would not be Schubert or Faure - two of his best-loved composers - but the song of an English blackbird. And it's the same with his profession. He doesn't "collect" artists (although he's not bad at spotting and identifying them years ahead of anyone else). He just loves music.
When he took over in October 1966, Lyne initiated a mailing list and a monthly concert diary. He devised a system whereby artists could appear at the hall without having to hire it. There would be no set fee, but artists and their managers would definitely receive some guaranteed payment. Lyne began to refine his already shrewd skills at gauging the box-office drawing power of artists and programmes alike, so that neither the artists nor the hall would lose money. He followed his instincts - and still does. When, in 1975, Andras Schiff won third prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition, he declared: "I knew I would not win, because I played Bach on the piano. But I don't care. I only care about my Bach." "That's the man for me," thought Lyne, and contacted his manager the next morning. Schiff's quietly intense and intensive music-making, together with that of his chamber-musical colleagues, and his own themed festivals, now epitomise an essential part of the Wigmore Hall's musical life.
This year's centenary season boasts no fewer than 54 concerts. Back in 1976, the hall's 75th anniversary offered just seven. But Lyne knew exactly who he wanted to open the celebrations: the veteran pianist Artur Rubinstein. "Well, write and ask him!" said Rubinstein's manager. Rubinstein not only agreed, but refused to take a penny, not even expenses. At the end, he rose to thank his audience: he had chosen the occasion as his last public recital.
The Wigmore had already weathered the competition from the new South Bank concert halls. Artists such as Alfred Brendel, Mitsuko Uchida and The Songmakers' Almanac had all defected to the Wigmore when they realised the difference in the way they would be treated there, and the intensity of their audiences' engagement. They returned to the South Bank only when the Wigmore Hall ran out of seats - the single reason why Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has never sung in Wigmore Street. On this site, yards and metres of Arts Council tape have been slashed: when Lyne wanted to pioneer London's first themed programme series - the complete chamber music of Faure - he asked no one's permission. He just went ahead and did it, "because it was something that needed to be done. And because I simply loved French music!"
When I returned from a summer in Finland, singing the praises of the then little-known Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, held deep in the birch backwoods of Karelia on the border with Russia, Lyne said: "Let's have them here!" Within a couple of years, the Kuhmo came to London, in a microcosm of the festival over a long weekend. Tricky without the lakes and the mosquitoes, the late-night saunas and the berry liqueur - but it worked. A year or two later, the Risor Festival - from the tiny fjord-town in southern Norway, and masterminded by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes - was recreated in the Wigmore Hall. Don't worry if you can't travel. Eventually, the world will come to the Wigmore.
Song and the human voice remain at the very heart of the Wigmore Hall. And in Schumann's "Im wunderschonen Monat Mai", we will be able to choose from Grace Bumbry paying homage to Lotte Lehmann (one of the hall's first divas), the counter-tenor David Daniels, Thomas Allen, Olaf Bar and Thomas Quasthoff. Julian Joseph, Piotr Anderszewski, Steven Isserlis and Andras Schiff are also among those in attendance. And gazing down on them all from above the stage will be Gerard Moira and Frank Lynn Jenkins's great arts and crafts mural, with its mosaic of the Soul of Music and the Genius of Harmony - the defining visual icon of the Wigmore Hall. Over the emergency exits stand two singers, chanting notes caught direct from the divine source of all harmony. If you listen very carefully, you'll be able to hear them, too.
The Wigmore Hall Centenary Festival runs until 18 July, with two special gala concerts on 31 May and 1 June. For more information, call 020 7935 2141 or visit www.wigmore-hall.org.uk
Hilary Finch is a music critic for the Times and a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3
