Elizabeth Brauss

The word “contested” shows up a lot lately in singer-songwriter Elizabeth Chan’s world, as she made headlines this summer for going to court to try to ensure that Mariah Carey is not legally granted sole possession of the “Queen of Christmas” tag, which has also been applied to her.

Elizabeth I is one of England's most famous monarchs, whose story as the 'Virgin Queen' is well known. But queenship was by no means a certain path for Henry VIII's younger daughter, who spent the majority of her early years as a girl with an uncertain future.

George Frederick Pinto (1785–1806) is one of the major ‘what-ifs’ of music history: a child prodigy both as performer (on violin and piano) and as composer, he was only twenty when he died, probably from tuberculosis or from what one writer called ‘dissipation’. But the music he composed in the little time he had reveals a composer as gifted as almost any of his contemporaries. These three quirky and inventive violin sonatas – receiving their first recordings here – sit on the cusp of Romanticism, their Classical elegance warmed by a graceful lyricism that looks forward to Schubert.