Bruce Hungerford

Australian concert pianist and Egyptologist

IIn 2021, as the Owls emerged, the idea of sharing their existing knowledge while expanding what was already known was touted in an international review that grew out of a FIAF/UNESCO survey. How might archival knowledge be preserved when older folk (for one reason or another) move on and are thinking about what they might do next? Decades of accumulated knowledge might not have found their way into a form in which information could be recorded and shared, other than in discussions with the possessor of that knowledge. In 2021, I suggested in an early meeting of the NFSA and NFSA Owls, that in 2022 it would be 100 years since the birth of the celebrated Australian concert pianist, Egyptologist and photographer, Bruce Hungerford. Unfortunately, COVID got in the way of progressing this idea and the moment passed. However, Australia should, I’d suggested at the time, flag Hungerford’s contribution to international pianism and to much else. Like Hungerford, many other Australasian pianists are still largely unknown in the country of their birth.  Eileen Joyce is well represented in memory (on CDs) and receives enthusiastic advocacy from the Callaway Centre, University of Western Australia. Less is known, for example, about Ernest Hutchenson and even less, I suggest, about Bruce Hungerford.

One way of improving general knowledge of this lost Australian will be to submit a proposal for an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) where he is presently unrepresented. Another would be to build an archives of this remarkable polymath’s various contributions to the arts and to science.

Hungerford was born in on 24 November, 1922 at Korumburra in Victoria, eventually finding his way to the Julliard music academy in New York in 1946 on a trajectory towards the international fame he achieved in the 1960s.  He had studied with Roy Shepherd in Melbourne, Ignaz Friedman in Sydney (who settled there in 1944), and then with Australian Ernest Hutcheson, Carl Friedberg and Myra Hess in the US, making his New York debut in 1951, as ‘Leonard’ Hungerford. By 1965, for a Carnegie Hall concert he had become ‘Bruce’ Hungerford. (A peculiar piece of Australianism, that.)

At the time of his death in 1977, his recordings included a two-thirds ‘complete’ Piano Sonatas of Beethoven, twenty-two of the possible thirty-two recorded by Vanguard Recordings in the USA.  (A link to Vanguard’s web-published version of these is given below.) He also recorded important pieces of Schubert’s piano music, including the substantial Wanderer Fantasy and also items by Chopin and Brahms. In addition, and after a stint as pianist-in-residence at Bayreuth (1959-1967), he made recordings of the complete piano music of Richard Wagner, much of it performed from original manuscript sources. (These recording were released exclusively by Richard Wagner’s descendants at Bayreuth.)

Though principally a musician, Hungerford’s presentations about Egyptian archaeology included a seventeen-part series of lectures in which he used many of his own photographs. He visited Egypt several times in the 1960s, including one visit as an official still photographer with the NBC’s River Nile Expedition documentary film-makers in 1961. Thousands of his own colour slides, particularly many taken in Nubia, were later used to illustrate what he had to say. Hungerford became a Fellow of the American Research Centre in Egypt where he gave piano recitals in support of the Centre’s archaeological work.

His life and recording career came to a tragic end in New Jersey in 1977.  On his way home from a lecture about Egypt that he gave at Rockefeller University, he was killed in a car accident, along with three others (including his mother).

Numerous performances and interviews featuring Hungerford are easily accessible on YouTube. The links there provide access to the ‘complete’ Piano Sonatas of Beethoven.  The second link, included below, is to a Chopin Nocturne, the one in D flat, Op. 27 No. 2.

Maintaining some sort of contact with artefacts from Australia’s national heritage should be easy where there is a substantial recorded legacy. In Britain, the English French horn virtuoso Dennis Brain is readily accessible on CD re-releases of his many vinyl discs and he too, can be heard on YouTube. An eleven-disc boxed set, released by Warner Classics and Parlophone in 2021 includes a substantial selection of Brain’s legacy.  And it has useful, brief notes in an accompanying booklet.

Walter Legge (1906-1979) – a giant of sound recording administration, especially for EMI, from the 1920s to the 1970s – writing Brain’s obituary, when he died in England, also in a car crash fifty years before Hungerford’s death, noted: ‘We have no way of knowing how Dennis might have developed’.  The same can be said of Bruce Hungerford. It seems likely that, given a few more years he might have scaled other musical heights. But there is much to be thankful about in the recorded legacy he managed to leave us. Like Dennis Brain and the magnificent English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, an often small but impressive catalogue of their performances will carry their contributions to their respective arts forward into the future. That is, provided that their names remain in the memories of the national and international communities they served. Though a ‘complete’ recorded piano works of Beethoven was on the cards at the time of Hungerford’s death and was only partly achieved, his contribution to interpretations of the piano music of the Romantics (in particular) was substantial and significant. We should, perhaps, also note that, having a complete collection of his recorded performances on the piano, as well as his recorded lectures about archaeology and also an archive of his photographic work would provide Australians with an improved sense of a remarkable life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jUDI9dgd_0&list=OLAK5uy_nsv_myHEEBpFljSyIKz0GLmhdz2zKzQuc&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STJjWYk10F0

Dr Jeff Brownrigg 2025