STOCKTON - Rachel Barton Pine has been playing the violin since she was 3 years old.
She's traveled the world, recorded albums, been a guest soloist with numerous symphony orchestras and even dabbled in her guilty pleasure: heavy metal.
Stickers bearing the logos of Metallica, AC/DC and Nine Inch Nails adorn her violin case, and she takes pride in the fact that she once accompanied Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page onstage in her native Chicago.
But the 35-year-old Pine enjoyed a first-of-a-lifetime musical treat Wednesday morning, and it happened in a high school auditorium in Stockton.
After spending an hour sharing her love of all things musical as well as her prodigious skills with aspiring violinists and cellists at Chavez High School, Pine received a command performance: a one-song concert by that school's highly accomplished mariachi band.
Afterward, she clapped and proclaimed the performance "awesome." The students had proven with the joy of their performance that they understood exactly the message Pine spends her life conveying.
"Once you are a creator of music, anytime you want, you can pick up your instrument and you can sing with it," said Pine, who will perform tonight and Saturday with the Stockton Symphony at Delta College's Atherton Auditorium. "To have that in a young person's life, I think, is so important for them as human beings.
"And then to go beyond that, to be able to share that voice with others in performance or just a casual setting, to be able to join with others, to sing together, all of that is a type of human interaction which is so healthy for us and really gets down to the core of what it means to be human."
Pine spent much of her time with the Chavez music students explaining violin techniques, recounting her daily eight-hour practice sessions as a child, sharing details of her life on the road and describing the ways in which she can draw a range of emotions from her instrument by varying the tempo and volume of her playing.
"It's inspiring to see someone like that. It makes me want to learn to play like that when I get older," said Chavez senior Angelica Serrano, a violinist who hopes to advance her music education at University of the Pacific.
Pine opened the hour by playing "Souvenir d'Amerique" - better known as "Yankee Doodle."
About halfway through, she gave the students a choice of listening to her play a song by Ozzy Osbourne or one by Metallica. The students overwhelmingly chose Metallica, and she thrashed her way through "One."
Near the end, Pine accompanied Chavez students as they played Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. And then came the mariachi finale, with violinist Jonatan Rivera among the players.
"I love it," said Rivera, a Chavez senior who hopes to study music at Pacific. "I love it because it's my passion now. Before, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be. Music gave me that bump. I can express myself in many different ways through the violin."
Pine said the value of music education cannot be overstated.
"It's just as important to nurture that in the spirits of our young people as it is to teach them about reading, writing and arithmetic," she said. "We want to raise human beings who are going to be good citizens of the world of the next generation."
Contact reporter Roger Phillips at (209) 546-8299 or rphillips@recordnet.com.
