Up for auction a RARE! "Bartlett and Robertson" Ethel Bartlett & Rae Robertson Hand Signed 3X5 Card. 

ES-5699E

Ethel

Bartlett (1896–1978)

and Rae Robertson (1893–1956), popularly known as Bartlett

and Robertson, were a husband-and-wife classical

piano duo who were credited with popularising two-piano music

in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s through their extensive

touring, recordings, and radio performances. Of English and Scottish background

respectively, Bartlett and Robertson met during their studies at the Royal Academy of Music in

London and married in 1921. Although they initially pursued solo careers, they

teamed up as duo-pianists in the late 1920s and conducted annual international

tours for over two decades. Several major composers of their era wrote

duo-piano compositions especially for them, including Sir Arnold Bax, Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, and the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. Ethel

Agnes Bartlett was born in Epping Forest, England, on 6 June 1896. At age 10 her

family moved to London. In 1915 she entered the Royal Academy of Music on

an Associated Board Scholarship; her younger sister Edith was enrolled as a

vocalist at the Academy. Bartlett studied under Frederick Moore and Tobias Matthay at the Academy, graduating in 1919. She

also studied under Artur Schnabel in

Berlin. In addition to piano, she played harpsichord and chamber music.

 John Rae Robertson was born in the

village of Ardersier in the Scottish Highlands on

29 November 1893. He was the eighth of nine children in a minister's family. He

showed an aptitude for piano playing at a very young age and began playing the

organ at his father's church on Sundays at the age of five. He continued to

study piano as a youth and as a student at the University of Edinburgh,

where he completed his M.A. in Modern Languages. In September 1914 he

began studying under Tobias Matthay at the Royal Academy of Music, but was

drafted in January 1915 into the English army for World War I. He sustained an arm wound at the Battle of the Somme in

July 1916 and a hand wound at Ypres in 1917. In 1918 he received his army discharge and

returned to the Royal Academy. He met Bartlett upon his return to the Academy,

and the two were married in Marylebone, London, in September 1921. Bartlett and Robertson

initially pursued solo concert careers. Bartlett had made the acquaintance

of John Barbirolli at

the Royal Academy of Music during the war years, as Barbirolli had been too

young for the draft, and they possibly had an intimate relationship. She

became his exclusive accompanist in the 1920s. She also performed with other vocalists and as

a soloist. Robertson played both with vocalists and other pianists. The two

also taught at Matthay's School of Music on Wimpole Street.

The couple first performed as duo-pianists on 17 June 1924 at Wigmore Hall, to mixed reviews. The Times's critic wrote, "They have not fully

understood yet that the point of playing on two pianos is not to get more sound

but to work out intricate detail more clearly". After their two-piano recital on 15 August

1924, The Times applauded their performance for its

"great zest, as though they really enjoyed every note of the contrapuntal

figuration".

They achieved fame in the United States and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s

as the "foremost two-piano team". By the mid-1940s, they were appearing in over

100 concerts a year, and had toured the United States, Canada, South America,

and South Africa.[5] In addition to their annual international

concert tours, they played several seasons with the New York Philharmonic Symphony

Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic

Orchestra, Washington National Symphony Orchestra, and Cincinnati Symphony

Orchestra. In July 1940 they played before 35,000

listeners at the Hollywood Bowl. They also

appeared on radio, playing, for example, Robertson's arrangement of Liebesträume No.

3 by Liszt on The Bell Telephone Hour national

broadcast on 6 July 1942.