Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist through and through. As a three year-old, the precocious youngster pestered her bemused parents for lessons following a performance by string students at her family’s church – and by the time she was five, she was ‘self-identifying’ not as someone who plays the violin, but as a violinist. ‘I had no concept of career,’ she says. ‘But I knew that was what I was meant to do with my life. That was my calling.’
True to her word, Pine never wavered from this belief. For her, the violin wasn’t just a means of entertainment, but a way to ‘nurture your soul and uplift your spirit’. By the time she was eight, and practising at her own instigation for many hours a day, her primary school headteacher suggested home schooling to her parents.
This proposal, dutifully taken on by her mother, allowed Pine to up the ante to eight hours of practice per day and to make her solo debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of ten. Soon after, she became the youngest-ever gold medal winner of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in 1992. This strong parental support is more remarkable considering neither of Pine’s parents were musicians – though her mother sang in the church choir – nor were they wealthy.
Florence Price, Franz Liszt… and onto a famous Edinburgh bar
Today, Pine’s passion for the violin is undiminished. Since 2021 she has, on the advice of her medical team, performed seated due to injuries sustained in an incident with a suburban Chicago commuter train in 1995 – but her playing ability is unaffected. We meet in the lobby of her Edinburgh hotel, following her performance the previous evening of Florence Price’s Second Violin Concerto (which we named as one of the Price’s very best works) with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) at Glasgow’s Usher Hall.
Though a relatively short work at under 15 minutes, the concerto’s sophisticated structure and increasingly busy violin part presents no easy task for the soloist – and Pine’s barnstorming encore of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 in Nathan Milstein’s fiendish arrangement certainly gave last night’s crowd their money’s worth.
I’m surprised therefore to learn that Pine visited Sandy Bell’s, an Edinburgh bar famous for its daily folk music sessions, after the concert, where she jammed for several hours with local musicians. And she’s due to travel to Glasgow to repeat the Price performance this evening – though she’ll be keeping things fresh with a different encore.
I self-identified as a violinist at five. I had no concept of career, but I knew that was my calling
Pine recorded the Price concerto recently with the RSNO as a special 25th anniversary addition to her 1997 album Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries for Cedille Records. Typical of her curiosity and commitment, what began as an interesting one-off project for a budding recording artist has turned into a multi-year mission, aimed at introducing long-forgotten works by Black composers not only to leading concert halls, but to violin students at the beginning of their educational journey.
A mission to champion Black composers
Growing up in musically diverse Chicago, Pine was exposed to Black classical musicians early on, ‘unlike so many colleagues of my generation who didn’t know that any Black composers existed until they got to university’. A trip to the Centre for Black Music Research at Columbia College turned up wonderful concertos by the likes of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges. An enormous replica of Bologne’s portrait, with his ‘white Mozart-style wig and sword’, so gripped the young musician as she entered the archive that it became the cover image for her album.
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Yet despite much interest in her 1997 recording, Pine describes spending years attempting to persuade orchestras to programme, for example, the Concerto in F sharp minor by José White Lafitte, an immensely talented 19th-century Cuban-French violinist and composer who overcame enormous odds to become an influential figure in Paris. ‘Then, all of a sudden, in 2021 there was a total sea change!’ she exclaims. ‘The world woke up and it was amazing. I didn’t have to convince anybody. My management was getting calls asking to book me for the José White.’
The Rachel Barton Pine Foundation: bringing Black composers back into the spotlight
That sea change has also helped to provide a boost for her Rachel Barton Pine Foundation, which for over 20 years has doggedly collected over 900 works by Black composers from the 18th to 21st centuries. The Foundation’s second and third volumes for violin students, featuring 31 meticulously researched and edited works, were released at the end of 2023 by Subito Music Corporation.
‘I must have been a metalhead since I was a baby’
That a love of music can encompass a diversity of styles is central to Pine’s ethos. Although she tells me that blues is her second favourite genre after classical, and that Scottish folk music is her fourth – both having formed the basis for boundary-defying albums – I’m particularly intrigued by her love of metal, the inspiration for her August 2023 release, Dependent Arising, which pairs Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto with the titular work by Earl Maneein, a violinist-composer known for his fusion of classical music, heavy metal and punk.
‘My mom says I must have been a metalhead since I was a tiny baby,’ Pine laughs. ‘She would be carrying me through the neighbourhood and if there were work crews breaking the pavement with a jackhammer, I would make her stop to listen. When I was ten, Santa Claus bought me a transistor radio and I discovered a station that played music by metal bands like Megadeth, Anthrax, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. I just loved that music!’
‘There are plenty of fans out there who listen to classical, metal and nothing else’
Metal also provided a way to relax between relentless hours of practice. ‘I was able to listen to metal and turn off my brain, which is not to say it’s brainless music,’ she says. ‘But my brain wasn’t trying to analyse it.’ It wasn’t until years later, however, when she started to perform rock covers on her violin, that she really noted the connection between the two genres. ‘I realised I must have been drawn to metal because it’s probably the closest to classical of all the sub-genres of rock. There are plenty of fans out there who listen to classical, metal and nothing else.’
Why Rachel Barton Pine is bringing heavy metal fans to classical music
So, in her early 20s, Pine embarked on another mission – to win over metal listeners to classical. ‘I started going to rock radio stations,’ she remembers. ‘I would play a cover of Metallica, AC/DC or Led Zeppelin and then I would play a Paganini caprice and talk about how a lot of bands were classically inspired – but also about how classical music isn’t just one genre and if you don’t like, say, Baroque music, you might still enjoy a Mahler symphony.’
Working with composers from numerous genres, from Billy Childs and Mohammed Fairouz to José Serebrier and Augusta Read Thomas, has also helped Pine to become ‘a better interpreter of the music of dead composers.’ ‘That’s because having now worked with such a quantity of living composers over the years, I’ve gotten to know the relationship between what’s written on the page and how open this might be to suggestion.’
So proud is Pine of her work with living composers that her next album, due for release in late 2024, will be devoted to solo works written for her throughout her career, and will feature accompanying conversations with each composer.
Musician and parent: raising a musical child
Pine is also learning important lessons from her daughter Sylvia, now 12 and also a violinist, but who at the age of four identified as a composer – much to her mother’s surprise. Pine herself is no stranger to composition, having published a volume of her own cadenzas and violin virtuoso pieces on Carl Fischer Music’s Masters Collection in 2009. But she’s modest about her own composing skills. ‘Composing-wise I’m more of a Heifetz and less of a Kreisler,’ she shrugs, referring to her ability to compose mostly for her own instrument. ‘But Sylvia has original melodies pouring out of her all day long.’
Appealing to her friend, composer Jessie Montgomery, Pine was advised to steer her daughter towards classical improvisation as well as composition lessons. The advice appears to have paid off, with Sylvia’s recent acceptance to the Chicago Symphony’s Young Composers Initiative. It has also inspired Pine to attempt improvisation herself.
‘Parenthood stretches you in unexpected ways’
When Sylvia told her mother that she would improvise her own cadenza to Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto for an upcoming concert, just as performers did in Classical times, Pine felt a pang of inferiority. Due to play Mozart’s Fifth herself on a Baroque violin for the first time in December, she admits that her own cadenza, composed some years ago, is less suited to the period set-up.
‘So, I’m thinking, if my 12 year-old can do the period-appropriate improvisation, I ought to manage it too!’ she laughs. ‘By the time this article comes out, I may or may not have attempted it… But that’s the beauty of parenthood; it stretches you in unexpected ways.’
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