In September, Una Bourne featured on this website as Composer of the Month. Todays, we highlight her as a pianist.
Una Bourne was active as a pianist from c1900 to just before WWII, both live and on record. She started in Australia, where she accrued many a glowing review from a very young age, when she swept the board at local competitions, carrying off every single prize. The accolades continued on her arrival in Europe, both of her live concerts and later, of the many recordings she made:
“The distinction of Miss Una Bourne’s playing seems to lie in the fact that the imagination and thought by which she has formed her musical conceptions is perfectly expressed in her technique.”
“As a pianist Una Bourne plays with her mind and her brain and her heart, as well as her fingers and is the most perfect concert artist to ever grace a concert platform.”
Despite this, she gets rather dismissed in modern reviews. The overview on Naxos labels her “competent, but no virtuoso”, and takes exception to her choice of “popular encores and lighter classics: many works by Chaminade, with whom she studied, as well as pieces by Paderewski, Scharwenka, Smetana, Cyril Scott, Sinding and Sydney Smith” suggesting that “Because of this her reputation today is not high.” The writer goes on to admit that she also recorded pieces “by Granados, Albeniz and Grieg”, thereby inadvertently disclosing his aesthetic priorities. She plays for effect, he says, though does not give details of this.
This hierarchy of repertoire is one that sticks, despite many attempts to demonstrate that “light” music does not mean “trivial”, and that economic success, i.e. writing what your audience likes and will buy, does not necessarily mean a corresponding lack of musical insight. Elaine Borroff writes of this in her defence of parlor music:
“This article is a culmination of unease. For years I had been reading about parlor music, accepting the subtle (and not so subtle) put-downs of that national institution without a murmur. But in some cavern of my mind, a dissonance was resonating, and one day I heard it. Most writers on this subject have used the word limited, applied both to the music and, of all things, to the audience.1 Charles Hamm speaks of “music designed to be performed by and listened to by persons of limited musical training and ability.”2 The clear implication is that parlor music was a style or genre created especially for second- rate performers who deliberately aimed second-rate musical salvos at second-rate listeners. I don’t believe it for a moment. I have no idea how to rank listeners. What persons compose a first- rate audience? Those with an IQ of 132 to the metronome? Those who survived Theory 101 with a B-flat or better? I know of no performer so toploftical as to demand more than persons who come, who listen, and who are willing to respond. Does a doorman check the incoming audience and refuse admission to those below some “cultural” standard? Does the box office at an elite university check the grades of students who want to buy tickets? I knew such statements about and negative characterizations of parlor music were all wrong because I had been there, and it was nothing like that.”
And yet Bourne was a pianist of choice of many highly-regarded musicians, such as Nellie Melba, with whom she toured for many years, and Leopold Godowsky, pianist and teacher. She once was chosen to replace Ferruccio Busoni at short notice in a concert, and on a piano roll of Brahms, shared space with Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer and Mita Nikisch. Are we to believe that people then had a lower standard than we do today? What was it about her playing (and personality) that kept her in such demand for decades?
Bourne was a pioneering recording artist, starting a thirteen year relationship with HMV in 1914, when she recorded two of her own pieces, Petite Valse Caprice and Nocturne. She would go on to record around 80 works, from composers as diverse as Chaminade, Paderewski, Beethoven and Cervantes. Most of these recordings were solo, but she also had a successful partnership with violinist Marjorie Hayward. She seems to have had a particular penchant for Scandinavian music, from Grieg to less-programmed composers such as Olsen and Palmgren. Her final set of recordings was made in 1926 and consists of a series mainly of short pieces by herself and Cecile Chaminade, who had featured prominently in her recorded repertoire over the past twelve years.
I have picked four recordings here, that demonstrate the breadth of her offerings, and range in chronology from theValse Caprice of 1914, to Chaminade’s Berceuse Arabe of 1926. There is a very clear, underlying performance aesthetic to all of them: Bourne’s priorities lie with precision, clarity of voicing, and a sense of overall structure rather than detail. There is enough variety to prove that her fondness for tempi on the fast side are not simply an outcome of the necessity of fitting a work onto a four-minute side.
Valse Caprice: recorded 1914
This is an acoustical recording of one of Bourne’s own works. Already there is the trademark clarity, the finger work in the tumbling triplets executed with silvery precision, and attention lavished on the left hand duet in the B section. Sometimes the triplets are given dominance, at other times, the counter-melody. While the waltz rhythm of the left hand is obscured by the combination of Bourne’s voicing and the recording level, one can hear some tantalizingly interesting detail – a highlighting of the tops of chords, or a directive change in rhythmic positioning. With each repetition the phrase endings are subtly different in both rubato and articulation. In contrast to the considerable cuts of later-recorded, longer works, here there is a repeat of the final section that is not in the score.
Kreutzer Sonata: recorded 1918
The recording of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata was the first of several that Bourne would make with violinist Marjorie Hayward, to critical acclaim. There is not really room here fully to explore the fascinating and dynamic performance practice on offer, but I will touch on a few of the more obvious points , saving the finer details of the partnership for a later date.
The first obvious issue is, of course, the cuts needed in order to fit the sonata onto four sides. These are telling for many reasons, including being a treatise on a certain approach to form, and the accuracy of hitting the four-minute target is impressive. Our modern sensibilities, so obedient to the nineteenth-centuy’s exhortation that we should listen to complete works and in silence, shrink at the swathes cut from this Kreutzer. But you know what? If I want the full experience, in itself an aesthetic choice highlighted by current listening habits shaped by streaming sites, I can go elsewhere. This is history-making, the first recording of this work, judiciously pruned to the four sides of 78s that it inhabited. The second movement is permitted to take two sides, meaning that there are only two small cuts, with lost time made up by ignoring repeats. The first movement is sliced to the required four minutes through one huge cut, while the last movement, also one side and thus four minutes, has several, smaller but nonetheless substantial cuts. (The first full-length recording would not be for another eight years, after the advent of electrical recording, when Isolde Menges and Arthur de Greef recorded it for HMV. Their performance comes in at around 34 minutes.) It’s worth noting, too, that the performance offers more proof that Bourne’s tempi are a musical choice, as much as a practical one. The Presto of the slow movement is slow by her standards, at minim=72, while the slow movement is crotchet=48. There are interesting choices here in ensemble – Hayward and Bourne clearly don’t see precision of playing a note exactly together as always the goal of good ensemble – dynamics, and articulation, both of which can stray quite a long way from the literal markings of (most) scores. It’s a fabulous performance, well worth shelving modern biases for.
Rondo alla Turca: 1925
Bourne takes it a good deal faster than almost anyone else at the time, at crotchet=164. In contrast, both Emil Sauer in 1923 and Rachmaninov in 1925 take it at 144, while 1933, Edwin Fischer adopts a stately 120. As a result, Bourne only omits two repeats in the 2’30” she takes to play the piece - and still has time for a ritardando at the end. Possibly as an outcome of this speed, Bourne does have a tendency to “land” on final notes of phrases, although this gives such a clear picture of the structure she is creating that it feels very much deliberate (and is not noticeable in recordings of other Classical era pieces). The clarity is still superb, and one can hear the colour change between major and minor, and particularly into the f# minor section. The way in which she emphasizes a LH crotchet melodic line is a particular highlight.
Berceuse Arabe: recorded 1926
This performance was recorded in the C Studio, Small Queen's Hall, on 18 October 1926, probably making it the last piece Bourne recorded. It was an up-to-the-minute repertoire choice, as the work had only been published the previous year. As already mentioned, Chaminade’s music played a large role in Bourne’s recorded output. It’s worth remembering that at this point, Chaminade herself was still recording and with some success, although her reputation was fading fast in the turn towards neoclassicism and newer modes. Bourne is perhaps a fellow victim of this change in aesthetic, being seen as a relic of a past age that music was surprisingly eager to dissociate itself from. Certainly it’s easy to hear a commonality in performance practice between the two pianists, not just in repertoire but in approach to the keyboard. Bourne clearly enjoys experimenting with the articulation, using very little pedal throughout.
