Rachel Barton Pine

Heralded as a leading interpreter of the great classical masterworks, international concert violinist Rachel Barton Pine thrills audiences with her dazzling technique, lustrous tone, and emotional honesty. With an infectious joy in music-making and a passion for connecting historical research to performance, Pine transforms audiences’ experiences of classical music.

Pine’s performances this season include concerts with the Ann Arbor, Columbus, and Phoenix Symphonies, the New Mexico and Reno Philharmonics, the Philharmonia Baroque and Teatro Municipal (São Paolo) Orchestras, Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne, the Tel Aviv Soloists, and Mercury Houston, as well as a residency at Domaine Forget. 

At Festival Lanaudiere, she plays “American Partitas”—a recital program of suites of dance movements composed for Pine by Bruce Molsky, Darol Anger, Billy Childs, and Daniel Bernard Roumain as well the Bach Partitas for solo violin that inspired them.

This season Pine celebrates the important contributions to classical music made by musicians of African descent in performance and through the release of two projects: Music by Black Composers (MBC) Violin Volume I and her 37th album, Blues Dialogues: Violin Works by Black Composers (Cedille) that explores classical music by 20th– and 21st-century black composers rooted in the blues, in addition to repertoire by four living composers: Dolores White, Errolyn Wallen, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and Billy Childs.

Galvanized by the fact that young people learning classical music seldom have the opportunity to study and perform repertoire written by black composers, over the last 15 years, Pine has collected more than 900 works by more than 350 black composers from the 18th–21st centuries, representing North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Pine’s not-for-profit RBP Foundation’s Music by Black Composers supplements the current instrumental training methods by publishing books of music exclusively by black composers from around the world, starting with violin. The inaugural MBC Violin Volume I features 23 works for violin with piano or second violin by 17 black composers spanning from 1767 to 2014 representing the United States, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, Switzerland, France, and England.

Her Elgar & Bruch Violin Concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton conducting; Mozart: Complete Violin Concerto, Sinfonia Concertante, with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Sir Neville Marriner conducting; Testament: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by Johann Sebastian Bach; Violin Lullabies; Bel Canto Paganini: 24 Caprices and other works for solo violin all charted on the classical charts, including at number one.

Pine has appeared as soloist with many of the world’s most prestigious ensembles, including the Chicago and Vienna Symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, and Camerata Salzburg. She has worked with such renowned conductors as Zubin Mehta, Erich Leinsdorf, Neeme Järvi, and Marin Alsop.

In addition to her violin soloist career, Pine is an avid performer of Baroque, Renaissance, and Medieval music on Baroque violin, viola d’amore, Renaissance violin, and rebec. Her most recent Baroque album is Six Sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach with harpsichordist Jory Vinikour (Cedille, May 2018).

She performs on the “ex-Bazzini ex-Soldat” Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu (Cremona 1742). rachelbartonpine.com