Arthur HINTON (1869-1941)
Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 30 (1910) [28:54]
Samuel COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912)
Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 1 (1893) [29:06]
York BOWEN (1884-1961)
Phantasie in E minor for violin and piano, Op 34 (c.1913) [14:28]
Tippett Quartet, Lynn Arnold (piano)
rec. September 2020, St George’s Headstone, Harrow
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7386 [73:03]
Recordings of British chamber music of the period covered by Dutton’s latest release – the two decades between 1893 and 1913 – often herald new discoveries. One such here is Arthur Hinton, a violin and composition student at the Royal Academy of Music and later of Rheinberger in Munich. Two decades ago on this site Lewis Foreman reviewed a concert performance of his Piano Concerto where you’ll find much biographical and other material to fill in details of Hinton’s life.
Unlike Bantock, whose exact contemporary he was, Hinton focused on conventional forms and means. In his works for piano he had the huge advantage of being able to call on his wife, Katharine Goodson, who was much better known than he. She frequently performed in America and played his Concerto there many times. The Piano Quintet had been premiered in London in 1910 and Goodson later performed it with the Kneisel Quartet in New York in early 1914, where Hinton was heard bewailing the plight of young British composers. His Quintet is in three movements, and this is its first recording.
Its opening is nervous, its second subject romantic and flowing and there are hints of Brahms. The piano writing is strong and demanding and thoroughly idiomatic; presumably Goodson saw to that. There is an especially lovely passage for the strings, a kind of reverie amidst the stormy surrounding material – a moment of blissful lyricism. The brief central movement is a puckish, witty, scherzo and the finale encodes the slow movement in its opening section, played on muted strings. The writing here is lyrical, rhapsodic in part, but also full of a recognisable form of nobility. This is pretty much an unknown work but the distinction of the thematic material, Hinton’s polyphonic command and well measured interplay between the piano part and the strings, all point to undeserved neglect. Lewis Foreman is quite right when he asks in his excellent notes; ‘How could we have been unaware of such a lovely score for so long?’
The other work that’s making its disc premičre, perhaps surprisingly given the attention he has received over the last twenty years, is York Bowen’s c. 1913 Phantasie in E minor for violin and piano. Kreisler had given the first performance of Bowen’s Suite in D minor a few years before, but the Phantasie seems never to have been published or performed. It’s a compact one movement piece that structurally falls into the usual Allegro-Lento-Scherzo-Allegro molto scheme. Bowen, not yet thirty, but something of a draw given the fast company he kept, is in full command of his romantically-oriented material. This confidence doesn’t let up and Bowen the pianist gives himself some excellent material whilst setting the violinist to work with scurrying passagework. I don’t think it would be ungenerous to point out that whilst the fiddle player sweats over the final pages the pianist enjoys the superior thematic material.
The only piece to have received a previous recording is Coleridge-Taylor’s Piano Quintet. This was his auspicious Op 1 of 1893, a commendably large-scale utterance from a young man of eighteen, very much under Stanford’s tutelage. The Tippet Quartet with Lynn Arnold take a decidedly slower gait than the Nash Ensemble in their Hyperion disc (CDA67590) who take the figure at a brisk March. So too did the players from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at a concert at the city’s Philharmonic Hall in November 2001 – their collective banner was ‘Live-A-Music’ - and which was available on a special limited release devoted to Coleridge-Talor; it also included his Fantasiestücke for string quartet, Op 5 and Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade. I happen to find the deliberate tempo for this movement taken by the Dutton team somewhat under-characterised, but they do hold the attention, not least in the clear Brahmsian moments. Textures lighten in the slow movement and then still more in the scherzo, the piano leading as often as not. The finale, meanwhile, strikes a Dvořákian pose with light folkloric gestures and then – to please Stanford? – a structurally and musically unnecessary fugato. Still, he was only eighteen.
The Hinton is the main focus of my attention because it’s never before been recorded. Lynn Arnold proves a sure successor to Katharine Goodson and the Tippett Quartet, whilst not the most sonorous of ensembles, are sensitive collectively and individually. In the Bowen the quartet’s leader, John Mills, plays with a focused slim tone and fast vibrato.
It’s telling, though, that whilst Dutton provide photographs of Coleridge-Taylor and York Bowen there’s none of Hinton. There are a couple of very poorly reproduced photographs of him in a frustrating biography of Goodson but otherwise he had become something of a forgotten man by the 1930s. It’s good to have the chance to hear his work in this well engineered disc.
Jonathan Woolf
