Stockton Symphony Association

Concert violinist resists attempts to be labeled

Oct 15

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine plays concertos with orchestras around the world, performs on baroque violin with an early music ensemble and has created more than a dozen recording projects ranging from tributes to underappreciated violinists such as Maud Powell and black composers of the 18th and 19th centuries to Scottish folk music and the world premiere of a 200-year-old violin concerto.

But to her, the breadth of her work is far from unusual.

Pine might concede that rehearsals and gigs with her heavy-metal band are a bit unusual for a violinist. Apparently though, they're still not enough to label her interests eclectic.

Pine, who began playing violin at age 3 and debuted in front of her hometown Chicago Symphony at age 10, might not accept "eclectic" as a description, but "busy" is one she's comfortable with, especially since her long-time love of heavy metal has turned into membership in a band called Earthen Grave.

"I've been doing my metal covers for more than a decade," she said. "It's been really great to be this catalyst for people to discover classical music for the first time. I get wonderful e-mail testimonials from people who say, 'I never tried this stuff, but now I love it.'

"I'm a missionary for classical music," Pine said.

Audiences will get a chance to hear Pine perform Barber's Violin Concerto this weekend in concerts with the Stockton Symphony. The program also features Grieg's "Holberg Suite" and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major.

Peter Jaffe conducts.

Barber's concerto, written in 1939 and premiered in 1941, is the only American violin concerto to have entered the mainstream concerto repertoire. Composed during the great flowering of American classical music that took place in the first half of the 20th century, the concerto's music is, Pine says, instantly accessible.

"The soaring melodies of the first and second movement really have that wonderful 'Americana' sound - wide open spaces kind of feel," she said. Pine described the third movement as, "devilishly difficult. It's a completely different animal. It's this wild, perpetual motion."

However, the piece's very existence was almost derailed by a dispute between Barber and Iso Briselli, the violinist for whom Barber was paid the then-princely sum of $1,000 to write the work, over the coherence and playability of the music.

Arbitration of the dispute was handled by a distinguished panel of musicians from the famed Curtis Institute. According to Pine, "Another young virtuoso violinist (at Curtis) was asked to learn the last movement in under two hours" for a performance in front of the jury. Their verdict? "The jury decided the piece did indeed hang together and Barber was allowed to keep his commission," Pine said.

That dispute struck Pine, 35, as symbolic of the difference between Barber and Briselli's relationship and the relationship she's had with composers who have written works for her. The artistic separation between composer and performer is far less rigid nowadays, so commissions are more like collaborations than was usually the case in Barber's time.

"I know for having worked with living composers, they will send you an e-mail of a PDF with excerpts of what they're working on, and then you get on your cell phones, and you talk to them or play into the phone," Pine said.

"You don't have to wait until the composer flies back from Europe where he's been writing the piece to get your very first look at it," she said.

The crucial difference from previous eras, though, is in the way composers now study the performers for whom they're writing. "They might come to some of my concerts or listen to my recordings and really get a sense of my playing and my technique and all of that - so that something of me is in the piece," Pine explained.

Trying to get that "something" into as many musical spaces as possible has been Pine's goal throughout her career, and playing doom metal with Earthen Grave is only the latest avenue in that regard.

"We feel we're doing something quite different, because I'm functioning really as a guitar: playing riffs, playing leads, really integrating into the very DNA of the band," she said.

Just don't call it eclectic.