Rachel Barton Pine / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Teddy Abrams DVORÁK - KHACHATURIAN Violin Concertos

                                                          VIOLIN CONCERTOS

Rachel Barton Pine / Matthew Hagle BLUES DIALOGUES

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine, “an exciting, boundary-defying performer” (Washington Post) known for her “bravura technique and soulful musicianship” (New York Times), headlines a groundbreaking album of blues-influenced classical works for solo violin and violin and piano by 20th and 21st century composers of African descent.
World-premiere recordings include Noel Da Costa’s A Set of Dance Tunes for Solo Violin, based on American fiddle tunes, and Billy Childs’s Incident on Larpenteur Avenue, a single-movement violin sonata/tone poem written as a response to a fatal shooting by police. Another premiere is Wendell Logan’s violin and piano arrangement of Duke Ellington’s 1935 composition, In a Sentimental Mood.
The album’s title track, Dolores White’s improvisational Blues Dialogues, draws on classical, jazz, and country music, as well as African-American vocalizations and a blues harmonic language. David N. Baker’s gospel-tinged Blues (Deliver My Soul) evokes the ecstatic energy of a Black church service. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Blue/s Forms and Louisiana Blues Strut befit a composer with a legacy of achievements in the classical, jazz, modern dance, and pop music worlds. Each movement of William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano evokes the work of a different African-American visual artist. Clarence Cameron White’s Levee Dance, a favorite of legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz, surrounds a traditional African-American spiritual with a playful, syncopated dance. Errollyn Wallen’s Woogie Boogie is a humorous and inventive reimaging of the boogie-woogie blues dance. Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Filter, with a new opening cadenza written specially for Rachel Barton Pine, conjures the sounds of electronic dance music and psychedelic guitar. Concluding the program, Charles S. Brown’s A Song Without Words was inspired by bottleneck guitar player and gospel blues master Blind Willie Johnson.

Rachel Barton Pine / Jory Vinikour J.S. BACH The Sonatas for Violin & Harpsichord

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, critically acclaimed artists of international renown — and also close friends — record together for the first time on this album of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas for violin and harpsichord. The artists approach these works as Bach intended: as trio sonatas with equally important roles for the violin and the harpsichord’s treble and bass lines. In addition to the six Sonatas, the album offers the remarkable and ravishingly poetic Cantabile, BWV 1019a, a freestanding work that Bach originally conceived as a movement of the Sonata, BWV 1019.
Cedille’s audiophile engineering and the intimate acoustics of Evanston, IL’s Nichols Hall allow the complex trio textures to blossom with detail. In all, the album sets a new standard for a body of work that Bach’s son, C.P.E., considered among his father’s finest compositions.

Rachel Barton Pine / Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Carlos Kalmar BRAHMS & JOACHIM Violin Concertos

I have been fascinated with the Brahms Concerto since my earliest violin lessons. I began studying it when I was 14, and it rapidly became a mainstay of my repertoire. It was with the Brahms Concerto that I won several of my international prizes and made many of my debuts in Europe and America. It remains one of the most fulfilling works I perform.

I have been intrigued by Joachim's "Hungarian" Concerto for many years. When I began to study it intensely it seemed a very natural fit, enhanced by two of my professors' strong connections to this music. One of my Chicago teachers, Roland Vamos, shares Joachim's Hungarian Jewish heritage. As a youngster, Dr. Vamos frequently accompanied his father to hear gypsy music in the cabarets of New York's Hungarian section. He even supported himself through college by playing gypsy tunes as a strolling violinist. His stylistic knowledge was an invaluable resource. My teacher in Berlin, Werner Scholz, was a student of Gustav Havemann, who studied with Joachim. I feel fortunate to have gained knowledge about both the Joachim and Brahms Concertos from one so close to the original source. My study of the Brahms was augmented also by reading Joachim's essay in his Violinschule in which he laid out how he felt the Brahms concerto should be played.

The long friendship between Brahms and Joachim enhanced their music and their lives. Friendship has also enhanced the performances on this recording. When I debuted with the Chicago Symphony at age ten, I gushed in a televised interview, "the Chicago Symphony isn't just any old orchestra. It's a great big, super-duper orchestra!" Over the eighteen years and many solo performances that followed, I came to know most members of the orchestra personally. The coaches, mentors, and teachers of my early teens have become chamber music partners, colleagues, and friends. Our history of working together adds a special dimension to the music whenever we collaborate.

I first met Maestro Carlos Kalmar shortly before this recording when we collaborated on the Joachim "Hungarian" Concerto in concerts with Chicago's Grant Park Orchestra. He is an amazing and inspiring musician with a warm personality. I will always be grateful for his musicianship, humor, and energy throughout our two-day recording marathon. He became a kindred musical spirit and a dear friend. I am very excited to be able to share with you these two wonderful concertos. (Rachel Barton Pine)

Rachel Barton Pine / Göttinger Symphonie Orchester / Christoph-Mathias Mueller MENDELSSOHN & SCHUMANN Violin Concertos - BEETHOVEN Romances

This recording by Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine has no right to work as well as it does. Funded through Kickstarter, it features the mid-level Göttinger Symphonie Orchester from Germany, and Pine takes on one of the absolute warhorses of the repertory, the Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, of Felix Mendelssohn. How could she have anything to add? As it happens, her performance of the Mendelssohn is startlingly good and merits consideration from anybody at all looking for a recording of the work. Her differentiation between the themes of the opening movement is very strong, with the second subject forming its own island of repose within the movement. And her finale is a romping joy: she says that she first played the work as a neophyte in a family concert devoted to the Wild West, and you can still hear a vigorous fiddling quality in her reading. Also worthwhile is the still rarely performed Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 23, of Robert Schumann. This work was suppressed after Schumann's death because it was thought to be too difficult to perform. Pine has an interesting angle on this. She reasons that the dedicatee of the work, Joseph Joachim, would have worked with him on revisions of the work, as he later did with Brahms on the latter's violin concerto, had not Schumann been suddenly incapacitated by mental illness. So she modifies the violin line. You can argue about this, but the changes do allow her to take the finale at a faster tempo than in most other recordings. And she keeps control over the large structure of the first movement, whose form is not easy to define. The two Beethoven Romances show Pine's capacity for simple lyrical lines, and the high quality of the recording as a whole is a quite unexpected surprise. (James Manheim)

Rachel Barton Pine BEL CANTO - PAGANINI 24 caprices and other works for solo violin

Billboard chart-topping violinist Rachel Barton Pine traverses Paganini’s ground breaking set of 24 Caprices with virtuosic flair and, in equal measure, reverence for the bel canto, or “beautiful singing,'' style of the composer’s generation. Playing on the ‘ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat’ Guarneri del Gesù violin from 1742, made by the same Cremona-based maker in the same year as Paganini’s own violin, Rachel channels the composer’s own technical wizardry as well as his love for beautiful melodies. Rachel was first introduced to Paganini’s Caprices at the age of six. In her early twenties she gave her first performance of all 24 Caprices in a single concert, a feat she has accomplished several times since including at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Ravinia Festival. Rachel fills out this release with other pyrotechnical works by Paganini, including his “Duet for One”, Caprice d’adieu and the Introduction and Variations on ‘Nel cor più non mi sento’ from Giovanni Paisiello’s opera La molinara. Inspired by Paganini’s legacy of virtuosic themes and variations, Rachel concludes the set with her own Introduction, Theme and Variations on ‘God Defend New Zealand’, written in 2000 for the final concert of her first tour of that country. Paganini dedicated his 24 Caprices ''to all the artists.” Rachel in turn dedicates this recording to “all the listeners,” of which there will be legions.

Rachel Barton Pine TESTAMENT Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin J.S. BACH

Rachel Barton Pine has often performed the Sonatas and Partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach in recital, but her 2016 release on Avie is her first studio recording of this essential masterwork for violinists. Using a Baroque bow on a modernized 1742 Guarneri de Gesù violin, Pine plays the Sonatas and Partitas with crisp accentuation, transparent voicing, and a warm tone, much as she does in her concert performances. Her interpretation, which is influenced by period practices but not limited by them, offers clear counterpoint in the sonatas and buoyant dance rhythms in the partitas, and there is little scratchiness in her stopped chords to disrupt the smoothness and transparency of her elegant lines. Pine's depth of feeling and expressive insights into the music keep it from seeming like dry, technical exercises, yet there is none of the overly rhetorical Romantic approach here, either, so this reading does justice to Bach's likely intentions while communicating emotion in a subtle and tasteful manner. Highly recommended. (Blair Sanderson)

Rachel Barton Pine / Academy os St Martin in the Fields / Sir Neville Marriner MOZART Complete Violin Concertos

2014 marked the 90th birthday of Sir Neville Marriner, whose experience and instinct for Mozart here gels with the artistry of the 40-year-old Chicago-born violinist Rachel Barton Pine. All five of Mozart’s violin concertos were composed during the 1770s while he was still in his teens, possibly for himself to perform since at the time he was recognised more as a violinist than as the keyboard player he soon became.

If the concertos have sometimes been underrated simply because of their early provenance, Barton Pine, in league with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the ever-stylish Marriner, reveals that there are subtleties alongside the grace and exuberance that render the music endlessly fascinating and appealing.

Barton Pine’s tone is pure, unadulterated by any extraneous affectation, and is ideally matched to the music’s lucid and chamber-like discourse; she plays her own, tastefully tailored cadenzas, since Mozart and his contemporaries extemporised their cadenzas and wrote nothing down. In the Sinfonia concertante K364 she is partnered by the equally sensitive, again Chicago-born viola-player Matthew Lipman, still in his early 20s and gifted with poise and a warmth of timbre that ideally complement the allure of the set as a whole. (The Telegraph)