Beatrice Harrison

Beatrice Harrison

Beatrice Harrison
Background information
Birth name Beatrice Harrison
Born (1892-12-09)9 December 1892
Roorkee, India
Died 10 March 1965(1965-03-10) (aged 72)
Surrey, England
Instruments Cello

Beatrice Harrison (9 December 1892 – 10 March 1965)[1] was a British cellist active in the first half of the 20th century. She gave first performances of several important English works, especially those of Frederick Delius, and made the first or standard recordings of others.

Biography

Early training

Beatrice Harrison was born in Roorkee, North-West India. The Harrison family moved back to England during her childhood and she studied at the Royal College of Music, London, and afterwards under Hugo Becker, and at the High School of Music in Berlin. In 1910 she won the Mendelssohn Prize, and made her debut in the Bechstein Hall, Berlin.

A musical family

Beatrice was the sister of May Harrison, violinist, a student of Leopold Auer; Margaret Harrison, a pianist; and Monica. Like the family of Mark Hambourg, this was one in which the children were taught separate instruments so that they could play in ensemble. May had once stood in for Fritz Kreisler in a Mendelssohn concert at Helsingfors. Both May and Beatrice won the Gold Medal of the Associated Board for violin and cello respectively. The Harrison family became friends with Roger Quilter and his circle through the Soldiers' concerts in 1916. On 11 March 1918 Beatrice performed Dvořák's Cello Concerto in B minor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Thomas Beecham.

Hugo Becker had spoken to Sir Henry Wood of his admiration for Beatrice Harrison's playing even before her debut. Both Edward Elgar and Wood were great admirers. May and Beatrice performed together under Wood's baton in Brahms' Double Concerto.

First performances of the Delius repertoire

Beatrice was the first performer of Delius's Cello Sonata (Wigmore Hall, 31 Oct 1918): on 11 November, May gave the first performance of the Delius Violin Sonata No. 1, which she later recorded with Arnold Bax at the piano. Roger Quilter attended both performances, for they were also playing his music in concerts at that time. The Violin Concerto, written at Grez-sur-Loing in 1919, had its first performance at Queen's Hall with Albert Sammons (the dedicatee) under Adrian Boult in the same year. Beatrice and her sister delivered the first performance of Delius's Double Concerto (which he had completed in 1915 and dedicated to them[2]) in his presence at a Queen's Hall Symphony Concert in January 1920.[3] After this Delius returned to Grez and, at Beatrice Harrison's request, began work on his Cello Concerto. She performed the Cello Sonata at a concert in Paris on 8 June. After two months' uninterrupted work in his Hampstead flat, Delius finished the concerto in the spring of 1921, and it was performed by the cellist whom Sir Thomas Beecham called 'this talented lady.' When Delius's remains were re-buried according to his wishes in a southern English country churchyard, on 24 May 1935, the village chosen was Limpsfield near the Harrison home at Oxted in Surrey: Beatrice Harrison played after the service, at which Thomas Beecham gave the oration.

The Elgar concerto

Harrison and Elgar on the recording session of Elgar's Cello Concerto, at HMV studio, November 1920.

Harrison gave the first festival performance of Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto outside London, at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1921. By 1924 she had toured in Europe and America, and in November 1925 she reappeared at the Royal Philharmonic in the all-Elgar concert, performing the Cello Concerto under Elgar's baton (he had insisted that she be the soloist whenever he conducted the work, after she studied the work with him prior to making an abridged, pre-electric recording). This was the occasion upon which the Gold Medal was awarded to Sir Edward by Henry Wood on behalf of the Society. A year or two later, when the advent of electrical recording had improved the technical potential of the gramophone, Beatrice Harrison was the soloist chosen to make the 'official' HMV recording of the concerto with Elgar conducting.

In 1929 at the Harrogate festival she was a contributor at a festival concert of works associated with the Frankfurt Group (Quilter and colleagues), and in 1933 Quilter re-arranged his 'L'Amour de moy' for her for a broadcast.

'... a nightingale singing along with her'

Beatrice Harrison's performances became well known through broadcast in the early days of BBC sound radio. She made some 'live' recordings in which she sat and played her cello in the garden of her house at Oxted, and the nightingales which frequented the place sang as she was playing. The tunes thus recorded included Songs my mother taught me (Dvořák), Chant Hindu (Rimsky-Korsakov) and the Londonderry Air (the tune of Danny Boy). Records were also issued of the nightingales singing alone and of the dawn chorus in the same garden. These recordings were extremely popular.

At least one person, however, has suggested that the bird sounds heard on the BBC recordings were not those of a real nightingale, but of a talented whistler, Maude Gould.[4]

Harrison appeared as herself in The Demi-Paradise, as a cellist playing accompaniment to the singing of nightingales for a BBC broadcast.

Wartime again

A granite gravestone in a grassy churchyard
Beatrice Harrison's grave at St Peter's Church in Limpsfield, Surrey, photographed in 2013

Perhaps inevitably the Elgar Concerto was the work with which she was most closely identified, not least in her performances for Henry Wood. There was a very successful performance in August 1937, and another at the Elgar Concert of 27 August 1940, with the London Symphony Orchestra, in the old Queen's Hall, less than a year before it was destroyed by German bombing. On this occasion the soloist's style was particularly animated, causing her ringlets to 'dance' in such a way that the orchestral players were distracted. During the concert, there was a rattle of gunfire outside and plaster fell inside the hall. Sir Henry considered her performance the finest he had ever directed. She was one of the English soloists who took part in Wood's very final season in July 1944, a month before his death.

Beatrice Harrison owned and played a cello made by Pietro Guarneri (Pietro da Venezia) (1695–1762).

She died in Surrey in 1965.

Centenary Concert

On 9 December 1992 at Wigmore Hall the Beatrice Harrison Centenary Concert was given by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and pianist John Lenehan. The programme consisted of works especially associated with the cellist including the Cello Sonatas by John Ireland and Delius as well as the Pastoral and Reel by Cyril Scott which Lloyd Webber played with Harrison's sister, Margaret, on the piano.

Recordings

(Not a complete list)

Beatrice Harrison in Literature

Sources

References

  1. ↑ "Cello.org Beatrice Harrison Page". Retrieved 17 July 2008.
  2. ↑ Arthur Hutchings in "The Concerto" (Penguin Books, 1952), article on Delius's concertos, page 267.
  3. ↑ Lee-Browne, Martin; Guinery, Paul (October 1, 2014). Delius and His Music. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 352–260. ISBN 1843839598.
  4. ↑ http://www.colander.org/gallimaufry/Birdsong.html Birdsong and Music

External links

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