Beatrice Harrison

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.

Beatrice was the sister of May Harrison, violinist, a student of Leopold Auer; Margaret Harrison, a pianist, but perhaps better known as a breeder of Irish Wolfhounds and a dog show judge;[2] 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.

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 gave the first performance of Delius's Double Concerto (which he had completed in 1915 and dedicated to them[3]) in his presence at a Queen's Hall Symphony Concert in January 1920.[4] 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.

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.

Beatrice Harrison's performances became well known through broadcast in the early days of BBC sound radio. She made one of the BBC's earliest live outside broadcast recordings in May 1924, when 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.[5]

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

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.