Harold Samuel

Harold Samuel (London, 1879 – London, 1937) was an English pianist best known as an interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach. He studied at the Royal College of Music, where he later also taught, and there his piano teacher was Dannreuther and his composition teacher was Stanford.

For many years he was known mainly as an accompanist. His concert career changed completely in 1921, when he gave a week of daily recitals devoted to Bach in London. That series fed a growing demand to hear Bach's keyboard music in its original form, rather than in the nineteenth-century arrangements that were then very popular. From then on, in England and on his numerous tours of the United States, he was hardly asked for anything other than Bach.

His repertoire, however, was broad. He committed the whole of Bach's keyboard music to memory, and he played it with a clarity, restraint and sense of form that have been described as extraordinary, and with an evident and infectious enthusiasm. He also excelled in the concertos of Brahms and as a chamber musician. He composed a small number of works, among them music for As You Like It (1907), the comic opera The Hon'ble Phil, songs and pieces for piano.