George Pinto

George Frederick Pinto (25 September 1785 – 23 March 1806) was an English composer and keyboard virtuoso.

Life and career Pinto was born in Lambeth and baptised as George Sanders. His father, Samuel Sanders (or Saunders) died young; his mother, Julia Sanders (née Pinto) was the daughter of Thomas Pinto (1714-1782), a London violinist of Italian origin. Thomas Pinto's second wife, the English singer Charlotte Brent (1735–1802), encouraged George's early musical upbringing. He used his mother's maiden name as his surname throughout his professional career.

Pinto started taking music lessons at a young age with the musician and impresario Johann Salomon. Initially, he was promoted as a prodigy on the violin. In 1793, aged 7, he performed a violin concerto by Jarnović at the Royal Amphitheatre in Dublin. In 1795 Pinto, then aged 9, made his London debut playing a violin concerto by Giovanni Mane Giornovichi at the New Lyceum in Hanover Square London. Samuel Wesley commented "A greater musical Genius has not been known". Other tributes came from William Ayrton and Johann Baptist Cramer.

Pinto's music was more or less forgotten after his death, although interest was shown by William Sterndale Bennett. It was not until the 1960s that interest in his works was rekindled. The musicologist Nicholas Temperley has noted that the piano works contain "astonishing anticipations of Beethoven, Schubert and even Chopin", and has opined that "only Schubert himself wrote more striking songs before the age of 20." The composer Geoffrey Bush has said of Pinto's G minor violin sonata that it is "passionate in mood, cogent in argument, and full of splendid thematic invention."

Pinto's piano sonatas have been recorded on CD by Thomas Wakefield, Ian Hobson, Riko Fukuda, Míceál O'Rourke and others, while some of his vocal works have been recorded on the Hyperion label.

Nicholas Temperley's The London Pianoforte School 1766–1860. (20 vols. London/New York: Garland, 1985) contains much of Pinto’s piano music, including the two Grand Sonatas Op.3 and the Fantasia and Sonata amongst others.