Nathan Pinkney - Viola and Violin - & Guy Donaldson - Piano

For the first concert in the 2023 Globe Sunday Matinee concert series audiences will be treated to the return of violinist Nathan Pinkney, regarded by some of the series’ patrons as a favourite performer. First training as an electrician in Manawatu, his hometown, Nathan moved to Auckland to pursue music full time. He studied violin under Stephen Larsen at the University of Auckland, and now teaches a full schedule of both private and group classes. From 2020/2022 he was violist in the Troubadour Program run by Adam Chamber Music Festival, and in 2020 he was awarded the audience choice award at the Gisborne International music competition on violin. Nathan Pinkney has been teaching violin in Auckland for 5 years and is violin/viola tutor with the Tironui Music Trust. In this concert he will be playing both the violin and the viola.
Nathan will be joined at the piano by well-known local pianist Guy Donaldson.
Guy received his formative piano instruction from Maurice Collier, and then at Canterbury University with Maurice Till. In 1984 he studied in London with Paul Hamburger and Roger Vignoles. Guy was a senior lecturer in music education at Massey until 2004, when he took leave to pursue his passion for performance and music teaching. He is active in the Manawatu as a teacher, adjudicator, piano soloist, accompanist, chamber music player and music coach, and was for 30 years music director of the Renaissance Singers.

Nathan will play two sonatas – one very well known by Beethoven, and the other less so by the Belgian nineteenth century composer Henri Vieuxtemps. When, as a thirteen year old, Vieuxtemps toured Germany giving recitals, Schumann compared him to the brilliant violinist Paganini. He also impressed Berlioz and Paganini himself. Berlioz described Vieuxtemps’ first violin concerto as a “magnificent symphony for violin and orchestra.” Vieuxtemps was particularly admired in Russia where he guided the formation of a “Russian school” of violinists. If there is a reason why Vieuxtemps has not become better known it may be that his compositions tend to be restricted to violin, viola and cello pieces. Two paralytic strokes in middle age had him spend his last years in a sanatorium in Algeria far from the musical centres of Europe.
The viola sonata is one of the most important pieces written for the viola in the nineteenth century. It also happens to be immensely lyrical and often playful.

It is followed by one of the masterworks for the violin – Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, named probably at least in part for its gentle and smiling opening, though like spring weather it soon develops some more dramatic episodes. A song-like second movement is one of Beethoven’s earliest evocations of intense feeling. Beethoven then introduces as something of a joke one of his briefest compositions, acting as a comic interlude at the expense of the violinist who is made apparently to keep getting behind the pianist. The final movement is joyous from beginning to end, with the opening melody undergoing continual playful treatments.

Admission is by donation, recommended from $5.