WETA: The Music of Florence Price with Rachel Barton Pine and the Fairfax Symphony

WETA
By Evan Keely

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine will be featured with the Fairfax Symphony performing Florence Price's Violin Concerto No. 2 in a concert on February 11 at the Center for the Arts at George Mason University. I reached out to her to ask about this performance and its place in the context of her career.

Evan Keely: You’ve had a long relationship with Cedille Records. Tell us about that, and the genesis of the 1997 album Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries (and its 25th-anniversary counterpart, Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries).

Rachel Barton Pine: When I was new on the scene back in 1996, Jim Ginsburg – the founder of Cedille Records and my longtime producer, who is Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s son – approached me after one of my performances and said that it would be great to start working together. My career was still in such an early stage that I didn't yet feel quite ready to record the major concertos. Of course, since then, I've recorded all the most popular ones including Brahms, Beethoven, Bruch, and Mendelssohn. But to start with, we wanted to do something that was more repertoire-oriented – where people might buy the album, even if they hadn’t yet heard of the soloist.

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