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Stories   >   Rachel Barton Pine's 'Dependent Arising' mixes classical with heavy metal / third coast review

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Rachel Barton Pine's 'Dependent Arising' mixes classical with heavy metal / third coast review

Posted: November 2, 2023

third coast review writes….Chicago is well known for having a rich and robust classical music community. One of the best measures of that is the talent that emerges from it. One great example is violinist Rachel Barton Pine, who tours the world and has performed with every great orchestra. She has a large recording catalogue. She does chamber music. She has a foundation that helps children with financial need pay for a classical music education. She researches and performs excellent music by Black composers who have been ignored by a profession filled with white (and male) composers.

She also will be performing a recital with pianist Inna Faliks at Ravinia on Saturday, November 4. In addition to sonatas by Beethoven and Ravel, the program includes works by Black American composers William Grant Still, Billy Childs, and Dolores White, a Chicago native who died at the age of 90 in March.

Pine is a heavy metal music fan and has championed this genre alongside the standard classical violin repertoire. Her most recent CD, Dependent Arising, includes a violin concerto by violinist Earl Maneein, the songwriter and lead violin player for the guitar-less metal core band Resolution15. This is not the first time Maneein has composed for Pine. He composed a solo violin piece Metal Organic Framework, which Pine premiered in 2014. Released on Chicago’s Cedille Records, Dependent Arising also includes Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.

In a wide-ranging interview last spring, Pine opened up about her career as a performer and educator. She discussed her upbringing in this city and the tremendous array of available resources that helped her learn, grow, and hone her talent. She has also been at the forefront of promoting classical music and helping emerging artists in underrepresented communities. She has a robust recording career, including numerous albums on Chicago’s Cedille Records. She also described her infatuation with heavy metal and how that came about.

I had attended some concerts of hers, and was generally impressed, but her recordings are what really grabbed my attention. First were her recordings of the Mozart Violin Concertos and Symphonie Concertante. The five violin concertos are early works that show Mozart’s teenage genius. They are a marvelous mix of juvenile joy and mature complexity. Pine showed off a remarkably delicate touch in the quieter moments and robust playing in the exciting moments.

She gave them even greater distinction by writing her own cadenzas. Of these works, my favorites have always been No. 4 in D-major, followed closely by No. 5 in A-major, with its “Turkish” inspired finale, and No. 3 in G-major. Yet, Pine’s playing expanded my interest in other works, especially No. 1 in B-flat-major, which has a beautifully lyrical slow movement and finale.

Recording these works with Sir Neville Mariner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra certainly added flair, as did her collaboration with violist and Chicago native Matthew Lipman for the Symphonie Concertante. This work from Mozart’s maturity, one of the few concertos by any major composer to feature a viola, is delightful from start to finish. As a pair, Pine and Lippman played magically off one another, combining the sweet sound of the violin with the sonorous sound of the viola.

That Rachel Barton Pine was a violin prodigy was evident from an early age. She started violin lessons at three years old and was playing Bach in her church, St. Pauls Church of Christ in Lincoln Park, at the age of four.

She recalled how the church often featured classical music. “The organist would play Bach Toccatas and Fugues, and the choir regularly did movements of Handel and Mendelssohn oratorios,” she said, reflecting, “It really shaped who I am as an artist because it wasn’t the idea of being onstage, or being judged. It was that, really, there’s no separation between audience and performer. We didn’t even think of it. We were part of a congregation. I happened to be the one making the music, but everyone was experiencing the music together, not on separate sides of the equation.”

This approach to making music together has influenced her ever since. “That idea of joining together to make and hear the music, not making the music for the purpose of entertaining or showing off, but for the purpose of uplifting our spirits, that was really the meaning of sharing my violin with people that I took to the stage and still carry with me, whatever the venue is, whether it’s a 2000-seat hall, or a hospital room playing for one person.”

Playing Bach growing up at church also played a big role in her development as an artist, which she described in the liner notes of her excellent CD, Solo Baroque. Unlike the Mozart concertos, which were released by Avie Records in 2015, this release was on Chicago’s Cedille Records, which has issued many of Pine’s recordings.

Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.

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