At
St Luke’s, West Norwood on Saturday 23 March 2002, the Lambeth Orchestra
and their conductor Christopher Fifield were joined by the American
pianist Dan Franklin Smith for the revival of the four movement
Piano Concerto in D minor by Arthur Hinton (1869-1941), which ran for
around 31 minutes. Hinton’s birth and death dates give us the clue:
he is the exact contemporary of Walford Davies, and although one encounters
his name from time to time in connection with the musical scene at the
beginning of the twentieth century, other than some piano miniatures
played literally decades ago by Frank Laffitte, I cannot remember having
heard anything by him before, though he has long been on my list of
names to explore. The Piano Quintet, Violin Sonata and a programmatic
piano suite A Summer Pilgrimage in the White Mountains
(all published) look comparatively inexpensive and rewarding ways to
explore further.
Hinton
is a shadowy figure who briefly seemed to be up-and-coming before the
First World war but is now less well remembered than his wife, the pianist
Katharine Goodson whom he married in 1903 and who gave the first performance
of his Piano Concerto in D minor in 1905. (Could Goodson be the only
major musician to be born in Watford? [Gerald
Moore was born there - LM]) In fact for us Goodson is
also long forgotten because although she lived well into the era of
LP she appears not to have been recorded, despite a big reputation in
her prime.
Born
at Beckenham, Kent, Arthur Hinton studied at the Royal Academy of Music
in the 1880s where his composition teacher was F W Davenport, the former
Principal MacFarren’s son in law. The same Davenport who took the first
prize from Stanford in the 1876 Alexandra Palace Symphony competition.
Hinton was a contemporary of Bantock at the Academy but does not appear
to have had the same youthful revolutionary impulse, a conservatism
underlined when later Hinton studied with Rheinberger at Munich where
his first symphony was played. A second Symphony was heard at the Royal
College in 1903. (For other intending pioneers, Hinton’s scores and
parts are at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.) When Bantock
promoted his celebrated concert of works by the new young composers
at Queen’s Hall in December 1896, all of them except one by Bantock
himself yet to be explored again, Hinton was one of the composers he
programmed.
Possibly
one of the reasons Hinton is not well remembered is that at key points
in his career he was in the USA (he also visited Australia and New Zealand)
and so he did not establish a presence in the UK with a succession of
new works. Even Dan Godfrey at Bournemouth only gave one work, this
Piano Concerto, in 1921 and 1925. The second of these performances was
by a young Clifford Curzon. I think Curzon must have been related to
Hinton - he certainly studied with Goodson - for whose Concerto he retained
some affection. Around 1980 he let it be known that he would be willing
to play the concerto without fee if someone would put it on, and Leslie
Head and another pioneering amateur orchestra, the Kensington Symphony
Orchestra, were considering it when Curzon died and the project fell
through. No one considered the work again until the Lambeth Orchestra’s
initiative. The Piano Concerto was published by J Fischer in New York
in 1920.
The
concerto is very much a work of its time. The opening orchestral tutti
welling up from a pregnant timpani motif and crowned by the piano’s
opening cadenza promises big things, and certainly the big-boned opening
movement, with its resonances of Tchaikovsky and Brahms was immediately
arresting and placed the concerto in the mainstream of romantic piano
concertos, in British music being contemporary with York Bowen, and
within a year or two followed by romantic piano concertos by Delius,
Edward Isaacs, Holbrooke and Haydn Wood. In fact, although first impressions
of the opening movement are of a barnstorming romantic, the later movements
are sunny and outgoing, the scherzo with a central waltz, the brief
slow movement a nostalgic cor anglais solo (just ten years after The
New World Symphony), and overall the piece has a delightful virtuosic
geniality.
Although
warmly sympathetic for Elgar’s Second Symphony in the second half, the
bathroom acoustic of St Luke’s Church did the soloist Dan Franklin Smith
no favours in projecting a busy and note-filled solo part. Nevertheless
Smith showed himself a fine pianist and a considerable virtuoso in the
many passages of flashing octaves and brilliant passage-work. In the
more delicate second and fourth movements he maintained an infectious
dancing momentum, music reminiscent of Litolff’s celebrated Scherzo
and Saint-Saens’ Second Piano Concerto. The orchestra acquitted themselves
with remarkable assurance, Christopher Fifield finding sympathetic tempi,
though in a drier acoustic or in the studio I can imagine the faster
passages having a more gossamer quality, even more fleet-foot and lightweight.
The
acoustic worked well for Elgar’s Second Symphony, which had a finely
blended sound, with little instrumental detailing, though when one sonority
suddenly emerged from the texture, notably the horns, it had all the
grand power of fulgent sunlight suddenly striking through threatening
clouds. This was an intensely enjoyable view of a great work, virile
and warmly expansive, and a triumph for what is after all an amateur
orchestra.
The
concert opened with Matthew Taylor’s overture The Needles, an
evocation of the Isle of Wight coast written a couple of years ago,
but it was almost impossible to follow its chiselled outlines and interplay
of contrasted colours in the resonant acoustic. Though the players seemed
to relish their opportunities I have to say it would be good to hear
it again in more sympathetic circumstances. But we went to hear the
Hinton, and it proved to be a worthwhile and enjoyable revival; congratulations
to all concerned, we will surely hear it again.
Lewis
Foreman
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