Harriet Cohen: The Complete Solo Studio Recordings = BACH: Klavier Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052 (two recordings); WTC, Book I: 9 Preludes and Fugues, BWV 846-854; “Mortify us by thy grace,” BWV 22 (arr. Rummel); “Beloved Jesus, we are here,” BWV 731 (arr. Cohen); “Sanctify us by thy goodness,” BWV 22 (arr. Cohen); “Up! Arouse Thee!” BWV 155 (arr. Cohen); Fantasia in C Minor (arr. Petri); MOZART: Piano Sonata in C Major, K. 330; CHOPIN: Nocturne in Major, Op. 15, No. 1; Trois Nouvelles Etudes, Nos. 1 and 3; Etude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 25, No. 7; BRAHMS: Ballade in D Minor, Op. 10, No. 1; Intermezzo in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4; DEBUSSY: Clair de Lune; La Cathedrale engloutie; FALLA: Andaluza; The Fisherman’s Tale; The Miller’s Dance; KABALEVSKY: Sonatina in C Major, Op. 13, No. 1; SHOSTAKOVICH: Prelude in E-flat Minor, Op. 34, No. 14; GIBBONS: Ayre; Alman; Toy; Coranto; Mr. Sanders His Delight; Hymn Tune Prelude on Song 13 (arr. Vaughan Williams); BAX: Paean; A Hill Tune; A Mountain Mood; The Oliver Theme; BATH: Cornish Rhapsody – Harriet Cohen, piano/ Orchestra cond. Henry Wood/ Philharmonia Orchestra cond. Walter Susskind/ Orchestra cond. Dr. Malcolm Sargent (Bax Morning Song)/ Philharmonia Orchestra cond. Muir Matheson (Oliver)/ London Symphony Orchestra/ Hubert Bath – APR 7304 (3 CDs), 77:21; 76:13; 78:41 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
The ravishing and talented British pianist Harriet Cohen (1895-1967) might be to the music world what actress Louise Brooks became to the cinematic world, an extraordinary personality who became iconic for the sheer force of her personality but never became, to quote Martha Gellhorn, “a mere footnote to someone else’s career.” Producer and restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn resuscitates all of the Cohen solo studio recordings, 1924-1948, which include the acoustic inscription of the Bach D Minor Klavier Concerto under Henry Wood, the first such recording of the work. For sophisticated gossip-mongers, of course, the real fascination of the collection lies with the assorted pieces by Arnold Bax, Cohen’s friend and lover for forty years—whose revelation of having had for twenty years another inamorata, Mary Gleaves, may have led to Cohen’s career-ending accident with a tray of glasses in 1948 that severed an artery in her right hand. No less compelling, beyond Cohen’s sheer prowess at the keyboard, are her political and personal commitments, the breadth of which involved politicians Ramsey MacDonald and Chaim Weizmann, writers like H.G. Wells, and even Albert Einstein. To note that Cohen’s life proves eminently “cinematic” simply reasserts the myths and realities posed by Ken Russell’s BBC-TV film The Secret Life of Arnold Bax.
Though I resist forming an attachment to acoustical records, I find the 24 September 1924 Bach D Minor Concerto under Henry Wood compelling for its clean and taut articulation of the evolving melodic line. The boxy orchestra sound does not diminish Cohen’s clearly resonant interplay and poised sense of musical pulsation, as in the marvelous Adagio, likely the result of her long studies with Tobias Matthay, the teacher of many of Britain’s finest keyboard artists. A two-day session, 11-12 October 1928, yields up a wonderful set of Bach preludes and fugues, the finesse and lyrico-dramatic contour of which rank Cohen as among the superior Bach acolytes of her day. The D Minor Prelude, BWV 851 makes the case, its fluid line and articulated singing line a testament to her natural ease, the Fugue a lesson on clean polyphonic voice-leading. Her bass chords and flexible upper line distinguish her for their fluency and innate songfulness; her C Minor Prelude reveals a sheer motor vitality no less mesmeric in its resonant power, the parlando transition to the supple fugue magisterial in temper. The C-sharp Major Fugue enjoys a decidedly buoyant dance character and solid coda. Her Fugue in C-sharp Minor remains unsentimental and daring in its open approach to Bach’s somber and dissonant harmonies. What a contrast, then, to the ensuing Prelude in D Major, its flowing motion a miracle of assorted colors and glistening textures. The Fugue presents in staid figures the contradiction of the delicately colossal, noble and strikingly thoughtful, songful and sober at once. Among the lengthiest of the preludes, the E-flat Major under Cohen has the breadth of a thoughtful fantasia, whose meditative sections she treats as a chromatically defined chorale, a performance that shines despite much deterioration in the original shellacs. The set concludes with the suave grace of Cohen’s E Major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 854, a subtle combination of legato and flowing runs, the pulse held together in a taut line. Cohen favored transcriptions of Bach chorales by Walter Rummel (1887-1953), despite his National Socialist politics which certainly offended her decidedly Semitic sensibilities. “Mortify Us by Thy Grace” from Cantata 22, from the same disc as “Beloved Jesus, We are Here” rings with lusty authority, while the latter, in Cohen’s own arrangement, casts a noble carriage and quiet intimacy.
The Concerto in D Minor (10 August 1946) that opens Disc 2 with Walter Susskind and the Philharmonia Orchestra is altogether a more expansive performance under improved sound conditions of electrical recording. Cohen’s layering of arpeggios and articulation of running passages proves as adept as ever, and we find no trace of “romantic” sentimentality in any of the movements. Cohen revisit’s a series of Bach of the WTC I: her 1947 Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor is tighter in the prelude than it had been in 1928; her fugue more solemnly expansive. Three Chorale-Preludes inscribed 21-22 March 1935 along with Egon Petri’s edition of the C Minor Fantasia add to Cohen’s authority in Bach, the busy undergirding of the chorales never intruding on the power of the top voice plainchant. The C Minor Fantasy resounds with thick organ chords that suddenly lighten up into angels’ feathers. The music assumes a galant march panoply, something like the postilion call in the “Beloved Brother” Capriccio that rushes into a toccata finale.
From 13 May 1932 Harriet Cohen performs Mozart’s C Major Sonata, K. 330, and she is to the Mozart manner born, virile and architecturally canny, much as we expect from Lili Kraus and Wanda Landowska from the same period. Both brilliant and passionately lulling, her Mannheim rockets convey a sensuousness and sophistication entirely musical. Subsequent to her poised Andante cantabile, the final Allegretto articulately fluent as any Mozart by Clara Haskil. The Cohen legacy in Chopin remains pitifully small: the profound Etude in C-sharp Minor, No. 7 “Cello” from Op. 25 (29 June 1928), in which her sostenuto playing, left hand articulation, and trill prove tautly dramatic. April 19, 1943 Cohen devoted to more Chopin, the lovely F Major Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 1, which might well symbolize her entire relationship to Arnold Bax, in serenity and storm, respectively. Two of the Trois Nouvelles Etudes, those in F Minor and A-flat Major, surge with interior passion, the first indicative what we might have had from Cohen in either the Fantasie-Impromptu or the F Minor Ballade. The A-flat evokes wistful farewell, the inner voices rich with harmonies and layered colors rendered by a natural exponent of the Chopin ethos.
The music of Brahms (29 August 1930), his D Minor “Edward” Ballade, opens Disc 3, along with the Intermezzo in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4. Cohen’s pesante approach to the Ballade just misses the ponderous, given its solemn weight. The middle section, infiltrated by the perennial Beethoven Fifth, bears the weight of bells and funereal pathos. Suave coloration marks the B-flat Major Intermezzo, deftly pedaled with intricately wistful nuance. The music of Debussy (rec. 26 January 1948) includes two sides: Clair de Lune, which Cohen plays in a modernist sensuous mode, close to that of the American George Copeland. La Cathedrale engloutie, with its bells and allusions to the Tristan myth, temperamentally suits Cohen perfectly, the mass, peals, and cascading waves all subsumed under her thunderous technique.
Spanish music held great sway in the Cohen repertory, but her signature Nights in the Garden of Spain she did not commit to records. On 9 January 1943 Cohen did inscribe three Falla pieces: a lively Andaluza (from Pieces espagnoles), The Fisherman’s Tale (from, El Amor Brujo), and fiery The Miller’s Dance (from The Three-Cornered Hat). The simmering bass line of Andaluza resonates long after the shellac has ended. Cohen’s instinctive feeling for cante jondo (deep song) permeates each of the selections. Earlier in the year (2 January 1943), Cohen paid homage to Russian repertory with a blithely clean rendition of the Kabelevsky Sonatina in C Major and the dark E-flat Minor Prelude of Shostakovich, conscious of the Russians’ plight in 1943. Her piano performance has a weight tantamount to the Stokowski orchestral transcription.
Like Glenn Gould later in the century, Harriet Cohen favored early British music, Elizabethan, that included music by Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd. The Gibbons Suite (4 December 1947) casts a graceful charm, a dalliance with “delight,” as it were. Ralph Vaughan Williams had presented Cohen with the Hymn Tune Prelude score for Harriet’s thirty-fifth birthday, for which he requested a payment of “one thousand kisses.”
The first of the recordings of the music of her beloved Arnold Bax, the 1920 Paean (7 July 1938) presents an aggressive study in layered ostinato, a passacaglia of some rhythmic character. Both the 1920 A Hill Tune and the 1915 A Mountain Mood (20 October 1942) present Bax in a Grieg moment, two miniatures inspired by the love of nature and gorgeously rendered by this most devoted apostle. Morning Song (Maytime in Sussex) Bax conceived as an aubade for piano and small orchestra to commemorate the twenty-first birthday of Princess Elizabeth. Cohen and Malcolm Sargent collaborate 7 February 1947, in this rhapsodic piece a bit reminiscent of the Debussy Fantasy, but cast in one eight-minute Hollywoodian movement. For a rare excursion in cinema from Bax, we have his own arrangement of his score for David Lean’s Oliver Twist, here (1 September 1948) recorded with the Philharmonia of London under Muir Mathieson, and the personnel includes Dennis Brain at French horn. The rather meandering treatment with piano obbligato, woodwinds, and viola wants to indicate Oliver’s spiritual loneliness in an often hostile London. A ray of hope enters in the major for the last three minutes, a kind of tinkled waltz theme that expands in texture, ending with strings, horn, and arpeggiated keyboard in relative bliss. Finally, Hubert Bath (4 November 1944) leads the LSO in a condensed Cornish Rhapsody, a mix of Liszt and Rachmaninov, for the film Love Story, the title obviously concocted before love meant never having to play the piano. Cohen’s facility stands in for the terminally-ill Margaret Lockwood in the film, another case of “old movie disease” rescued by a competent score.
—Gary Lemco
Charles Munch – Elgar Variations; Martinu Piano Concerto; Boston Symphony Orchestra – Forgotten Records
Another set of historic recordings, Munch and the BSO
