Artist Bio

Heralded as a leading interpreter of the great classical masterworks, American concert violinist Rachel Barton Pine thrills international 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 performs with the world's leading orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, and the Chicago, Vienna, and Detroit Symphony Orchestras. She has worked with renowned conductors, including Teddy Abrams, Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Semyon Bychkov, Neeme Järvi, Christoph Eschenbach, Erich Leinsdorf, Nicholas McGegan, Zubin Mehta, Tito Muñoz, and John Nelson, and has performed chamber music with Jonathan Gilad, Clive Greensmith, Paul Neubauer, Jory Vinikour, William Warfield, Orion Weiss, and the Pacifica and Parker Quartets.

This summer and 2023/24 season, Pine joins the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Stéphane Denève at the Hollywood Bowl for a performance of Billy Childs’ Violin Concerto No. 2 written specially for Pine, in addition to performing with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Mercury Chamber Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, National Symphony of Uruguay, and Minas Gerais Philharmonic, among others. Recital appearances include at the Kennedy Center, Ravinia, and the Festival Internacional de Música de Guadalajara. Early Music appearances include a performance with Symphoria and her daughter, Sylvia Pine, in New York; San Francisco Early Music Society with harpsichordist Jory Vinikour; and in Virginia with her Trio Settecento.

In August 2023, Cedille Records released Dependent Arising, an album that reveals surprising confluences between classical and heavy metal music by pairing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Earl Maneein’s Dependent Arising – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, written for Pine and performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Tito Muñoz. In September 2022, Cedille released Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries: 25th anniversary edition which features Pine’s new recording of Price: Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Jonathon Heyward, and reprisals of her 1997 recordings of masterworks by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1775), José White Lafitte (1864), and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1899). And in March 2023, Pine’s performance of Malek Jandali: Violin Concerto No. 2, recorded with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, was released on an album of Jandali concertos.

Pine’s other discography of over 40 recordings includes Dvořák and Khachaturian Violin Concertos (Teddy Abrams and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra); Brahms and Joachim Violin Concertos (Carlos Kalmar and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), and Elgar and Bruch Violin Concertos (Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra). Pine and Sir Neville Marriner’s Mozart: Complete Violin Concertos with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and her Bel Canto Paganini both charted at number three on the classical charts. Pine’s Testament: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by Johann Sebastian Bach and Violin Lullabies debuted at number one. Her recent Blues Dialogues is an album of blues-influenced classical works by 20th- and 21st-century Black composers.

Pine frequently performs music by contemporary composers, including major works written for her by Billy Childs, Mohammed Fairouz, Marcus Goddard, Earl Maneein, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Daniel Bernard Roumain, José Serebrier, and Augusta Read Thomas. In addition to her career as a soloist, she is an avid performer of baroque, renaissance, and medieval music on baroque violin, viola d’amore, renaissance violin, and rebec.

In addition to her regularly scheduled performances, Pine has subbed in for her fellow soloists for a number of incredible concerts. Most notably, in 2021, with just 3 1/2 hours’ notice, Pine performed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop in place of Midori.

She has appeared on The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, PBS NewsHour, Prairie Home Companion, NPR’s Tiny Desk, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Performance Today, and in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She holds prizes from several of the world’s leading competitions, including a gold medal at the 1992 J.S. Bach International Violin Competition.

She writes her own cadenzas and performs many of her own arrangements. With the publication of The Rachel Barton Pine Collection, she became the only living artist and first woman in Carl Fischer’s Masters Collection series. During the pandemic, she performed the entire solo violin part of 24 different violin concertos, live and unaccompanied, for her weekly series “24 in 24: Concertos from the Inside.”

An active philanthropist, Pine has led the Rachel Barton Pine (RBP) Foundation for over two decades. Early in her career, she noticed that young people learning classical music seldom have the opportunity to study and perform music written by Black composers. Since 2001, Pine and her RBP Foundation’s Music by Black Composers (MBC) project have collected more than 900 works by 450+ Black composers from the 18th–21st centuries. MBC curates free repertoire directories on its website and publishes print resources, including pedagogical books of music exclusively by global Black classical composers and the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation Coloring Book of Black Composers. Additionally, the RBP Foundation assists young artists through its Instrument Loan Program and Grants for Education and Career. Pine has also served on the board of many not-for-profits including the Sphinx Organization.

She performs on the “ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat” Joseph Guarnerius “del Gesù” (Cremona 1742), on lifetime loan from her anonymous patron.

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