George Frederick PINTO (1785-1806)
Sonata for Piano and Violin No.1 in G minor (c.1806) [19:49]
Sonata for Piano and Violin No.2 in A major (c.1806) [19:26]
Sonata for Piano and Violin No.3 in B flat major (c.1806) [18:06]
Elizabeth Sellars (violin)
Kemji Fujimura (piano)
rec. July 2015 and February 2016, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music Auditorium, Monash University, Melbourne
TOCCATA TOCC0366 [57:24]
George Frederick Pinto – named deliberately in honour
of Handel – was born in London in 1785 and, like Thomas Linley, is one
of the great what-ifs of British music. Both were precocious and both died
desperately young: Linley drowned at twenty-two and Pinto died, possibly of
TB, at the age of just twenty.
Pinto was by all accounts a distinguished violinist, performing frequently
as a soloist in London, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh. Studies with Haydn’s
patron, Johann Peter Salomon, must have given him an edge as he was promoted
from a young age. Not content with virtuosity on the violin he was an excellent
pianist, performing public concertos, but his health gave way and appearances
were curtailed. Indeed, it was his life as an executant musician that kept
his name alive, not necessarily as a composer.
Shortly after his death his mother published a volume of three sonatas ‘for
the pianoforte with an accompaniment for a violin’, and they are amongst
Pinto’s last works. All are in three movements. The most advanced is
the first, in G minor, and it reveals some salient features of his compositional
art. The first is good use of minor keys, another is phrasal flexibility and
still another, in this work at least (though not in the companion sonatas),
is an appreciation of Sturm und Drang elements. Themes are excellent and often
cast in darker, lower strings. In fact the English composer Geoffrey Bush
admired the first movement of this sonata, writing about it appreciatively
in the relevant volume of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain. The central
movement is calm after the storm, a passion-spent moment of reflective warmth
before a genial Rondo, full of extrovert charm and propensity for key changing,
brings some naturally witty writing to end the piece.
There’s a Mozartian element to the writing, and that’s certainly
the case with the second of the set, the piano often leading with the violin
commentating and picking up lines. Lyrical and easy-going there’s also
a proto-Schubertian melodic freshness to the writing. Other enjoyable things
include the pathos of this sonata’s songlike Andante, and the Haydnesque
finale with badinage between the two instruments. The B flat major sonata,
the last of the set, is straightforward in its opening movement to such an
extent that one is totally unprepared for the raptly expressive but notably
spare slow movement. It is exceptionally effective. The lightly tripping Rondo
finale banishes care.
The balance is realistic and the recorded sound is well judged. Helpful booklet
notes are always a bonus, as here.
Elizabeth Sellars and Kemji Fujimura play well on modern instruments, Sellers
playing a Hornsteiner violin, though it’s undated in the notes. Their
performances are attractive, though Sellars can be fluty in the upper strings
and she essays one or two scoopy effects. But in the main their attention
to the Classical detailing of the sonatas pays dividends.
Jonathan Woolf
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