Cohen’s first teacher until the age of thirteen was her mother. She then studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London winning the Ada Lewis Scholarship, and at the school of Tobias Matthay where later she was a teacher. She quickly gained a reputation for playing the works of Bach and those of contemporary English composers. At her Berlin debut a critic noted that ‘So deeply has the Master’s spirit entered into her that she has few, if any, equals as a Bach player.’ Her debut in New York received similar notices. In 1924 she played at the Salzburg Contemporary Music Festival and at the Coolidge Festival in Chicago in 1930. A close association with the English composer Arnold Bax and his circle led to Cohen becoming the dedicatee of his Symphonic Variations (1917) and the concertos by Vaughan Williams (1933) and Peter Racine Fricker (1954) as well as the Sonatine Op. 354 by Milhaud (1956).
She gave first performances in Britain of works by Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel and Medtner, the first performance in Vienna of Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1919 gave the first performance of Satie’s Gymnopédies. In chamber music Cohen enjoyed many collaborations with artists such as Lionel Tertis, William Primrose, Leon Goossens, Joseph Szigeti, Pierre Fournier, and the Pro Arte and Bohemian Quartets.
Having injured her right hand in 1948, Cohen then played many works for the left hand, her friend Bax composing a Concertante for her in the same year. Although she eventually resumed performances with both hands, she retired from the concert platform in 1960. Cohen received various awards from Britain and abroad, being made a CBE in 1938 and a Freeman of the City of London in 1954. The Harriet Cohen International Award was founded in 1951.
Although she lived well into the LP era, all Cohen’s recordings were made on 78rpm discs. She recorded for Columbia, with the exception of a recording of the Piano Quintet Op. 84 by Elgar. The composer himself had requested that she be the pianist on the recording, and as he was an HMV artist, the recording was made for that company, with the Stratton Quartet. Cohen recorded a variety of music for Columbia including works by Brahms, Chopin, Bach transcriptions by Egon Petri and herself (the scores of which were published), and Mozart’s C major Piano Sonata K. 330. She also recorded works by Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Debussy and Orlando Gibbons, and collaborated on disc with Tertis and Primrose. For the Columbia History of Music Series she recorded Bax’s Paean, but her most popular disc was of Hubert Bath’s Cornish Rhapsody, made in 1944. The music was written for the film Love Story (1945) and Cohen can be heard on the soundtrack of the film with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.
In the late 1920s Columbia decided to record the forty-eight preludes and fugues (Das wohltemperierte Klavier) of Bach. Busoni had recorded the first prelude and fugue in 1922 for the same company, and had suggested recording the complete forty-eight, but Columbia were not enthusiastic. The first nine preludes and fugues were recorded by Cohen in October 1928, and the next eight preludes and fugues were recorded by another pianist, Evlyn Howard-Jones, a year later. However, the project was then abandoned, possibly due to poor sales, but it is fascinating to compare critical reception of these recordings on their initial release in 1929 with that on their reissue in 1995. ‘She approaches his music with simplicity, just as she would approach any fine music, absorbs it in her intensely musical and intensely modern mind and plays it with no other purpose than to express the beauty of the music before her… She comes into the world of Bach-playing like fresh air into a stuffy room… It is right that Bach’s piano music should be recorded in its entirety; it is wise to let Harriet Cohen do it.’ By 1995 a great deal had changed in the performance style of Bach’s keyboard music and after referring to Cohen’s ‘exaggerations and posturings’, the critic complained that she ‘…adopts “hunt the slipper” interpretations of the fugues (heavy-handedly “bringing out the subject”), becomes swooningly sentimental in the C sharp minor (the end of the Fugue pulled about unmercifully), and behaves in the E flat minor Prelude like a tragedy queen.’
Apart from the Bach preludes and fugues, very little of Cohen has been reissued on compact disc. In fact, apart from an HMV Treasury LP from 1978, few of her recordings have seen the light of day since their original release on 78rpm disc.
