Harold Samuel apparently went to Vienna at an early age to study, but a serious illness made him return home. He studied the piano with Mathilde Verne (1865–1936), but did not enter the Royal College of Music until he was seventeen, the year after Eduard Dannreuther (1844–1905) was appointed as Professor of Piano. Apart from giving the British premières of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Grieg, Dannreuther lectured on and performed Bach, and Samuel’s natural affinity for this composer was brought out in his studies with Dannreuther. At the Royal College of Music Samuel also studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and was influenced by Hubert Parry.
For many years Samuel acted as accompanist to numerous instrumentalists and singers, and in these concerts he often had the opportunity to play a piano solo. Encouraged by his success with various works by Bach, Samuel decided to give an all-Bach recital in June 1919 at London’s Wigmore Hall. One critic wrote, ‘In playing Bach on the piano Mr Samuel never sacrifices either the composer or the instrument in the cause of the other. All the resources of modern piano tone are placed at the service of the music, but it is the music alone which matters.’ At the London Bach Festival in 1920 he played Bach’s Concerto in C major for three keyboards with great success, being joined by fellow-pianists Herbert Fryer and Myra Hess. However at this point in his career Samuel had a wide performing repertoire and did not play solely Bach. In October 1920 he gave a recital at the Wigmore Hall which included Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A flat Op. 110, Mozart’s Rondo in A minor K. 511, three Scarlatti sonatas, Schumann’s Fantasie Op. 17 and Ravel’s Ondine from Gaspard de la nuit. He also promoted new English music, and the following month played the Piano Sonata by James Friskin and some preludes by his composition teacher Stanford. Also in that programme he played Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903. On 27 April 1925 he gave the first performance of the Piano Concerto by Herbert Howells at a Philharmonic Concert conducted by Malcolm Sargent.
It was Samuel’s week of Bach recitals on six consecutive days beginning 31 May 1921 that sealed his reputation as a Bach player. He was already forty-two by this time, but from then on, wherever he played, Bach would be requested. His playing was described as ‘so simple and inevitable’ that his audiences had ‘the easiest time imaginable’. It should be noted that the recitals were not long and would generally contain a suite, a partita and a toccata, or a suite, a partita and a group of preludes and fugues. Occasionally, one of the six concerts would be of the ‘Goldberg’Variations BWV 988. The recitals became an annual event in London, sometimes given twice a year, and although Samuel often would vary the works, by 1928 he had honed the six programmes to Partita No. 3 in A minor BWV 827, French Suite No. 6 in E major BWV 817; Partita No. 1 in B flat BWV 825, Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903; Toccata in C minor BWV 911, English Suite No. 3 in G minor BWV 808; short preludes etc, Italian Concerto BWV 971; Toccata in G minor BWV 915, Partita No. 2 in C minor BWV 826; and English Suite No. 2 in A minor BWV 807, French Suite No. 5 in G major BWV 816. Samuel also gave two-piano recitals with Myra Hess, sometimes of works by Bach and Mozart, other times by Rachmaninov, Schubert and Brahms, with Bach arranged by Harold Bauer and Samuel himself for two pianos or piano duet.
In 1933, for the celebrations of Brahms’s centenary, the Isolde Menges String Quartet with various friends of Menges performed the complete chamber music in eight concerts at the Wigmore Hall with Samuel as pianist. By 1935 he was giving his last London series of six Bach recitals. He played one of the six partitas at each concert, but there was an audience ‘not nearly sufficient to fill the Wigmore Hall’. At the end of 1936 Samuel was taken ill on board ship whilst returning to England from a tour of South Africa and died two months later in January 1937 at the age of fifty-seven.
Samuel taught regularly at the Royal College of Music and his pupils included Benjamin Britten, Howard Ferguson and Angus Morrison. Samuel composed a few works, including music for Shakespeare’s As You Like It for performances at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1907 and a comic opera The Hon’ble Phil.
Samuel’s keyboard style was one that served the music he was playing: always structured and rhythmic, delicate and chaste at times; yet some of his Bach performances could be quite ardent in their romanticism, prompting one reviewer to write of his playing of some preludes and fugues that one was ‘…surprised afresh (however well one knows them) by the way in which the preludes forestall the romanticism which historians say began to come into music about a hundred years after the first book of the “48” was published’.
Samuel recorded for HMV and Columbia, often making the first recordings of the works in question. From 1923 comes Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 which Samuel plays in the edition by Hans von Bülow, and the Fantasia in C minor BWV 906. Although his discography is small, fortunately Samuel recorded complete major works by Bach. In 1926 he recorded the Partita No. 1 in B flat BWV 825, and the English Suite No. 2 in A minor BWV 807. Between 1923 and 1927 he recorded three preludes and fugues. In 1931 Samuel recorded the Partita No. 2 in C minor for Columbia and the following year recorded short pieces by Clementi, C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach for Columbia’s History of Music by Ear and Eye Series. In the centenary year of Schubert’s death 1928, Samuel made charming recordings of a few short works for HMV as well as some by Brahms. With violinist Isolde Menges we get a chance to hear Samuel as accompanist and realise just how good he was. They recorded Brahms’s Violin Sonatas No. 2 in A Op. 100 and No. 3 in D minor Op. 108 for HMV in 1929 and a year before, Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in E major BWV 1016. The opening of the A major Sonata displays Samuel’s pellucid tone and understanding of the Romantic spirit. Only one live recording seems to have survived: Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major BWV 1050, from a broadcast of December 1935 in America. Koch Legacy issued most of Samuel’s recordings on two compact discs in 1992.
