Emmanuele Baldini: Mignone

The Strad Issue: March 2025

Description: A fitting tribute to a charismatic Brazilian

Musicians: Emmanuele Baldini (violin) Lucas Thomazinho (piano)

Works: Mignone: Violin Sonatas

Catalogue number: NAXOS 8.574595

The São Paulo-born Francisco Mignone (1897–1986) wrote five violin sonatas, in whole or part, but numbered only the last three. A standalone Allegro deciso from 1916 delivers on high-flown late Romanticism, which matures three years later into a full-scale, three-movement A major Sonata, Fauréan in style but none the worse for that. Baldini capitalises on Mignone’s fluent gift for melody, drawing long lines with unfussy dabs of portamento.

The Sala São Paulo seats 1,500, cloaking Baldini and Thomazinho in a black-velvet acoustic, but there’s nothing out of focus about their playing. If anything, Baldini over-compensates with a tone slightly narrower than ideal in the early pieces, whereas his vibrato sometimes draws attention to itself in the clustery, anything-goes modernism of the three numbered sonatas from the mid-60s.

It is not entirely clear from the otherwise useful booklet essay why Mignone left the genre alone for 45 years only to pick it up again with such industry, beyond his friendship with the violinist Mariuccia Iacovino and her pianist husband. When he did so, he piled in Bartókian folklorism, Messiaenic canons and sixths, late-Schoenbergian lyricism – the lot.

The First Sonata especially unfolds like a page-turner full of urgent plot development and unexpected twists. More conventionally violinistic figuration in the Third Sonata places Baldini under the spotlight as a mischievous Pierrot figure: postwar modernism at its most playful.

PETER QUANTRILL