PHOTOGRAPHY: LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist through and through. As a three year-old, the precocious youngster pestered her bemused parents for lessons following a performance by string students at her family’s church – and by the time she was five, she was ‘self-identifying’ not as someone who plays the violin, but as a violinist. ‘I had no concept of career,’ she says. ‘But I knew that was what I was meant to do with my life. That was my calling.’
True to her word, Pine never wavered from this belief. For her, the violin wasn’t just a means of entertainment, but a way to ‘nurture your soul and uplift your spirit’. By the time she was eight, and practising at her own instigation for many hours a day, her primary school headteacher suggested home schooling to her parents – a proposal, dutifully taken on by her mother, that allowed Pine to up the ante to eight hours of practice per day and to make her solo debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of ten, before becoming the youngest ever gold medal winner of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in 1992. This strong parental support is more remarkable considering neither of Pine’s parents were musicians – though her mother sang in the church choir – nor were they wealthy.
Today, aged 49, Pine’s passion for the violin is undiminished. Since 2021 she has, on the advice of her medical team, performed seated due to injuries sustained in an incident with a suburban Chicago commuter train in 1995 – but her playing ability is unaffected. We meet in the lobby of her Edinburgh hotel, following her performance the previous evening of Florence Price’s Second Violin Concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) at Usher Hall. Though a relatively short work at under 15 minutes, the concerto’s sophisticated structure and increasingly busy violin part presents no easy task for the soloist – and Pine’s barnstorming encore of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 in Nathan Milstein’s fiendish arrangement certainly gave last night’s crowd their money’s worth. I’m surprised therefore to learn that Pine visited Sandy Bell’s, an Edinburgh bar famous for its daily folk music sessions, after the concert, where she jammed for several hours with local musicians. And she’s due to travel to Glasgow to repeat the Price performance this evening – though she’ll be keeping things fresh with a different encore.
Pine recorded the Price concerto recently with
