Alistair Hinton

Alistair Richard Hinton is a Scottish composer and musicologist with a focus on the works of his friend Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. He is the curator of the Sorabji Archive.

WWW sorabji-archive.co.uk/hin...

Career and works

Hinton, a native of Dunfermline, Fife, began studying music at the age of eleven; following the advice of Benjamin Britten, he studied at the Royal College of Music, where Humphrey Searle and Stephen Savage were among his teachers. Although he began composing at an early age, he later destroyed most of his pre-1985 output.
His Op. 1 was a piano sonata ; although part of it was lost soon after it was written, the composer responded to a private request in 2020 to reconstruct it. His other compositions include sonatas, variations and other works for piano, a violin concerto, songs, works for the organ, a string quintet, and a Sinfonietta. They include homages to Karol Szymanowski, Richard Strauss, and Charles-Valentin Alkan in the Piano Sonata no. 5, which has a substantial passage marked "Alkanique". The latter influenced Marc-André Hamelin in composing his own Étude no. 4.
Among those who have performed and recorded Hinton's works are Donna Amato, Jonathan Powell, Yonty Solomon and Kevin Bowyer.

Personal life

In 2014, Hinton and his wife Terry were responsible for a petition to the British government to remove the statutory immunity it gives to the Financial Conduct Authority so it is not liable for damages.
He currently lives with his wife in Hereford.

Sorabji

In 1969, Hinton came across a copy of the four-hour Opus clavicembalisticum of the reclusive composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, which greatly impressed him. In 1976, he persuaded the composer to relax the ban he had placed on unauthorised performance of his music in the 1930s. Hinton subsequently founded the Sorabji Archive, which publishes Sorabji's writings and compositions and maintains a collection of his manuscripts and archival materials; he remains its curator. Hinton contributed two chapters to the 1992 book, Sorabji: A Critical Celebration. He was the dedicatee of eight works by Sorabji, and was the sole heir of his oeuvre.