Concerts aplenty: Christina Boughen and the mid-century City Hall performances

Guest blogger: Juanita Simmonds, recipient of the Christina Boughen OAM Fellowship for 2022.

Picture a time before Netflix or even TV, when programs on the wireless were your entertainment. Petrol was rationed due to wartime priorities but cinemas, dances and live music played on.

It was 1941 when Brisbane City Council began offering regular concerts in City Hall, with free admission for Brisbane’s 335,520 residents.

These performances became an important part of Brisbane’s cultural calendar for audiences and musicians alike. They were well attended by the public, including servicemen and women, and highly regarded by reviewers, and so met the council’s aims in funding them. Meanwhile, the concerts provided paid gigs for local performers during the wartime.

By the end of the 1940s, concertgoers were offered six per month, with programs of mixed performers and ensembles, and recitals by solo and chamber musicians. These events spanned centuries of classical music from Johann Sebastian Bach to Michael Head, and included perennial violin favourites by Henri Wieniawski and works by Australia’s Vera Buck.

Among the Queensland pianists who performed in the first decade of these concerts were Sybil Peake, Dulcie Sampson, Hilda Woolmer and Christine Whyte, the latter recognised today as Christina Boughen.

Christina Boughen on stage in Brisbane’s City Hall, 1940s-1960s

As a young woman, Christina Boughen (1920-2014) had already begun working as a professional pianist on ABC radio when in 1942 she first appeared in the Brisbane City Council concerts.

At that time, using her birth surname, she was known as Christine Whyte and she would go on to perform under this name for many decades as accompanist, associate artist and soloist. In the 1950s, concertgoers watched her play duos with her organist-pianist husband Robert Boughen.

In the mid-century council concerts, Christina played works from the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods; from George Frideric Handel to Johannes Brahms and William Walton. She played solo piano pieces by Joseph Haydn, Frédéric Chopin, Francis Poulenc and more, as well as accompanying a rich variety of compositions for voices and instruments.

Music and family

Christina’s music career and identity continued throughout her married family life – something not too common for women of her era.

And she continued to perform while raising a family with Robert. This became a point of interest, and the Boughen papers held by the State Library of Queensland contain several clippings of promotional articles showing Christina with their young children.

The newspaper extracts and concert programs in the Christina Boughen OAM and Robert Boughen OBE papers also show that following her 1951 marriage to Robert, Christina continued to use her birth surname of Whyte professionally until the 1970s.

Brisbane City Council concert programs, 1940s to 1960s

In the Christina Boughen OAM and Robert Boughen OBE papers is a collection of selected programs from Brisbane City Council concerts in which Christina performed from the post-war period through to the 1960s.

The concert programs are a single sheet of paper folded in half to form a booklet, with the repertoire and performer details inside. Each concert began with the National Anthem, which was Britain’s ‘God Save the King’ until 1952, then ‘God Save the Queen’ until ‘Advance Australia Fair’ replaced it in 1984.

Not only do these programs reveal the history of Brisbane’s classical musical scene, but they are a visual archive too. Design enthusiasts can track changes that mirror the aesthetic of the day. By 1969, the photograph of City Hall was gone from the front page. Modern fonts were used for text, and a logo was devised to represent the council’s acronym BCC, with the notes B, low C and high C notated on the treble staff.

A professional musician

Christina Boughen also performed in many other concerts in Brisbane and South-East Queensland as both soloist and accompanist. In 1948 she played Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in G Minor with Queensland Symphony Orchestra and two years later gave the premiere performance of Percy Brier’s Piano Concerto in C Minor. For several years Christina accompanied the concerts and toured around Australia with the finalists of the Mobil Quest, a major competition that propelled the careers of classical singers including Joan Sutherland.

But the State Library of Queensland's Boughen collection of council concert programs lift the lid on an impressive aspect of Christina’s artistic practice at that time.

These Brisbane City Council concert programs show the range of compositions performed for audiences in the middle decades of the 20th Century, and the sheer amount of repertoire demanded of a pianist such as Christina Boughen.

Through both wartime scarcity and the prosperity that followed the end of World War II, Christina Boughen was generous with her musicianship on stage, whether as piano soloist or associate artist.

Juanita Simmonds
 

Collection

• Christina Boughen OAM and Robert Boughen OBE papers, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 
• Collection Guide

Other blogs

• A curtain call for Christina Boughen
• Christina Boughen and the Brisbane City Council concerts, 1978-1997