HARRIET COHEN

One of my favourite pianists is Harriet Cohen, who although she played extensively, recorded only a small part of her repertoire. Now and again there will be something new brought to the CD world, but still there is little around of hers that we can hear and enjoy.

Harriet Cohen' playing according to the discs I have myself heard, has a wonderful sound, and she really seems to make her sound appropriate to the music she is playing.

When the Bach Well Tempered Klavier was to be recorded in its entirety, it was divided between several pianists, the first few being recorded by Cohen. They are to be found on the Biddhlph CD label and are fine recordings.

Cohen excelled as a Bach performer, and this is documented in two recordings of the D minor concerto, the one with Susskind is the one I know and it is quite delightful.

Yet Harriet Cohen was a champion of modern music, perhaps more so than any other English pianist. She gave innumerable first performances, had many works written especially for her, and even played many concerts from the actual manuscript the composer had given her, the work being so new.

She did of course, face some criticism for performing so much avant-garde music, and it was suggested to her on many occasions that were she to play the standard repertoire like everyone else did, she would get far more popular engagements!

Among her travels she went to the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia as it then was) and was decorated by Benes. She gave the first performances in the UK of the Piano Concerto by Dvorak.

Somewhat hampered by having very small hands, it is said that this limited her repertoire, although I am not really all that convinced that it did. She did say herself that 'my stretch is so small I can barely compass an octave' and that Furtwangler said that her hands were 'the worst and smallest he had ever seen for the pianoforte!'.

In Spain she took time to equate herself with Granada, and grew to love the Alhambra; and Falla spent time with her on her interpretation of his Noches En Los Jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain), which is a concertante work in the form of three nocturnes. It is a most evocative work and so full of Spanish flavour, and makes enormous musical demands on the soloist.

It was a disappointment that she never recorded the piece; Falla having said that she really should have been the one to make the first recording of it. Cohen wrote of an amusing incident when she gave the first performance of the piece in Vienna. Dressed in an elegant Spanish gown, she came onto the platform, and as the orchestra played and waiting for her entrance cue, she looked up at the box in front of her. To her horror she saw Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Artur Schnabel sitting in a row! Like a young student, her feet began to tremble on the pedals, her fingers grew icy, but after a shaky start the performance, fortunately went very well!

But perhaps more than any other composer she was associated with Arnold Bax. He wrote many pieces for her, and it was at her Proms Debut that she performed his massive Symphonic Variations - a work that few pianists have attempted.

Much has been written of her close relationship with Arnold Bax, who did indeed leave his wife, although there was never a divorce. It was assumed by Harriet that his wife's Spanish and Roman catholic ancestry made a divorce difficult. It was not until Bax's wife died in 1948 that Harriet, who still thought that after all those years Bax would marry her, discovered that he had been keeping another mistress, Mary Gleaves, and there had, in fact, been no bar to his divorce.

It was around this time (and from what I have read not long after) that Harriet injured her right hand in a domestic kitchen accident, when an antique glass shattered in her hand. For a time her right hand was out of action and Bax wrote his 'Concertante for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra) for her, although by that time he had become, by his own admission, rusty in writing for the piano.

The Left hand concertante is a marvellous work, and there is a private - or at least difficult to find - performance of Cohen playing, albeit in very poor sound, the performance is one of great quality.

Later the use of her right hand was restored, and although there is some doubt as to how complete her recovery actually was, a live recorded performance of Bax's Winter Legends from 1954 would suggest that the recovery was a good one.

As a young woman, as can be seen from the pictures, Harriet Cohen cut a most elegant and attractive figure, and was popular amongst friends and colleagues, and also a very popular artist to appear at the Proms. It does bear wondering about how it was that she had such a long and in the end disappointing liaison with Bax, who was some years her senior. This, of course, really has to be by the by. What has given her fame, and rather a lot of it, is the quality and wonder of her abilities as a pianist, and even from the very few recordings that she has left, that cannot really be called into question!