Vera Bradford

Vera Florence Bradford (5 September 1904 – 6 January 2004) was an Australian classical pianist and teacher, with a very long career. Her playing was admired for its depth and beauty of tone, classical unity and tremendous power.

Vera Bradford was born in Melbourne to a musical family. Her mother Edith was a pianist, and her father Frederick and brother Cec were violinists. She started learning the piano at the age of seven, and she graduated from the University of Melbourne Conservatorium in 1927, with the highest honours. In 1928 she took up a scholarship with Percy Grainger in Chicago. (Grainger and his wife Ella became close friends of Vera’s, and Ella always stayed with Vera on Percy's visits to Australia.) She also studied at the Chicago Musical College with Rudolph Ganz and Alexander Raab. It was Raab who introduced her to the technique that made her famous, the 'arm weight' technique of the Russian teacher Theodor Leschetizky, which she had first experienced when seeing Benno Moiseiwitsch perform in Melbourne in the 1920s. It was this which developed the big tone and control that became a feature of her performances of the works of Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Liszt. Raab insisted she not play the piano for a year, so that she could unlearn her previous techniques, and practise with the piano lid down.

Her debut was in 1931 at the Chicago Opera House where she played the Hungarian Gypsy Airs by Sophie Menter, orchestrated by Tchaikovsky. This was followed by a long and triumphant career as a concert pianist in which she gave many first Australian performances – George Gershwin's Concerto in F, Richard Strauss's Burleske in D minor (1937), the Sophie Menter piece mentioned above, Debussy's Feux d'artifices, and works by Bartók and William Walton. She played extensively in Australia and with the fledgling Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) orchestras before World War II, and after the war undertook a number of overseas tours. In 1946 she was the first Australian woman to perform the Brahms concertos, which the ABC and Bernard Heinze had previously considered too difficult for a woman. The critic Neville Cardus wrote of a performance of the D minor concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra: "Miss Bradford put forth a strength which many men might envy or fear. It was virtuoso playing of a rare order".

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