Concert pianist Helen Gordon (nee Collier) has gifted a baby grand piano to Whanganui's Sarjeant Gallery.
Concert pianist Helen Gordon (nee Collier) has gifted a baby grand piano to Whanganui's Sarjeant Gallery.
The redeveloped Sarjeant Gallery will be home to a beautiful Yamaha baby grand piano thanks to a generous gesture made by concert pianist Helen Gordon QSM, nee Collier, niece of artist Edith Collier.
“Helen Gordon has gifted the piano to the Edith Collier Trust and it will be available for the gallery’s use in perpetuity,” Sarjeant Gallery relationships officer Jaki Arthur said.
“The Yamaha baby piano, which is actually about a metre and a half wide and 5′6″ [1.68 metres] in length, will allow the gallery to host concerts by world-class classical musicians and performers.”
Arthur has visited Gordon twice at her home in Taihape.
“Helen had a marvellous career as a concert pianist and travelled the world,” Arthur said.
“She married farmer Ron Gordon when she was 33, and they had three sons and lived on a sheep station out of Taihape. They were happy, but every now and then Helen would ‘exit stage left’ for a period to go overseas to play at various recitals, benefits and concerts, sometimes at the invitation of the New Zealand government. Ron was very supportive of Helen’s career.”
In 1985, Helen Collier (Gordon’s professional name) played to an audience of VIPs in Washington DC. It was the first concert in the city’s Spring Concert series, and then-NZ Prime Minister Bill Rowling was present.
“It was at the time of the nuclear ban, and Bill Rowling was very anxious that we have a successful concert and make a good impression,” Gordon said.
“It was a wonderful concert and I was in my best form. I worked really hard for it and think it was one of my best, but I was scared stiff at the start.”
One of Helen Collier's 1985 programmes from the NZ Embassy in Washington.
Forty years on, Gordon still plays her grand piano for personal enjoyment and entranced Arthur with a private recital in her living room. As a 4-year-old, Gordon loved the piano and was keen to practice on her parents’ English piano.
“Right from the word go, I wanted to play. We all learned piano from my dear mother, and when we visited the aunties in Whanganui, we all had to line up and play our pieces. Aunt Edith played the cello, but it was always the piano for me. I loved hearing other instruments but had no wish to play them and, although I love singing, I had no wish to sing. I love choir music, but as regards the piano, I am one-track-minded.”
Playing the piano brought some solace when she and her siblings were sent to boarding school in New Plymouth during World War II. Gordon remembers feeling very homesick, cold and hungry because of food rationing.
“I used to just go in and play; the other girls didn’t bother. I had my own practice time and everybody else’s practice time.”
The Collier family was very musical; an aunt played the piano extremely well, as did her grandfather, who owned one of the first music shops in Whanganui (inside the Collier building at 57 Victoria Ave) and another in New Plymouth with his brother.
“They were both very good musicians and I know they did a lot for music here. They brought in sheet music and used to import hundreds of pianos.”
Gordon trained in New Zealand, Australia and Vienna. After completing her LRSM in New Zealand, she studied for three years on a New Zealand government bursary at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney and for a further three years at the Vienna Conservatorium of Music, graduating in 1960. She performed all over Europe, Panama, Australia, Fiji and New Zealand, giving solo recitals and appearing on television and radio. She also performed with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and regional orchestras.
Gordon continued playing around New Zealand but found that a difficult fit with motherhood and family life. She took a few years’ break when she had her third child.
“When Johnny, aged 5, started school, I thought, ‘If I don’t pick it up again now, I never will’, so I did. Perhaps not to the same extent, but I played around New Zealand and overseas. But it was hard with the kids. I’d be practicing until 10pm at night. Johnny used to say, ‘I can’t go to sleep unless you practice, Mum’.”
Gallery director Andrew Clifford said the Sarjeant was “very grateful to Helen Gordon and the Edith Collier Trust for this extraordinary gift”.
“Having access to a piano of this quality is something the gallery could only have dreamed of. It goes without saying that Helen’s baby grand Yamaha piano will be treasured at the Sarjeant.
“It will be treated with every respect, and we have undertaken careful measuring to make sure it can fit in the lift, move across the interior air bridge, across galleries and through doors so it will be able to be seen and enjoyed all over the building.”
