Preview of Vancouver Symphony Concert with Rachel Barton Pine (Mendelssohn) - plus Salvador Brotons (Shostakovich)

Photo credit Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Virtuoso violinist Rachel Barton Pine will to play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the Vancouver Symphony this upcoming weekend (November 2nd and 3rd) at Skyview Concerto Hall. This is a return engagement for Pine, who dazzled the audience the last time she was in town (May 2022) with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto. This time around should be just as amazing,

A native of Chicago (where she still lives), Barton’s artistry has garnered a shelf of accolades, including being the first American and youngest person to win the J.S. Bach International Violin Competition. She has soloed with orchestras around the world and is featured in 34 recordings. On top of that, she started the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation to promote classical music education, including string music by African-American composers.

Mendelssohn’s concerto is one of the most famous concertos that has ever been written for the violin, and Pine has perfomred it many, many times.

“I learned the Mendelssohn when I was nine years old and played it for the first time with orchestra when I was 10 and 11, said Pine. “One of the most memorable of those concerts happened when I was 11 years old. I played the last movement with an orchestra for a Wild-West-themed family concert. If you think about it the theme in the last movement of the Mendelssohn has a similarity with famous theme from the William Tell Overture. At that concert I got to wear a blue-jeaned skirt and cowboy boots, braids, big belt buckle. To this day, when we get to the last movement of the Mendelssohn with that famous trumpet call, I think yee-haw!”

Since Pine has done the Mendelssohn countless times, I had to ask her if she ever gets tired of playing it.

“I’ve always vowed that if I ever go to a point in my life where something didn’t inspire me any more, I wouldn’t do a gig just to do a gig,” replied Pine. “I would only play a piece if I still felt excited to play it. Thus far, I haven’t gotten sick of anything, even the ones I play most often. One of the hallmarks of a great masterpiece is that you can do it over and over again, and you can always hear different nuances and search of different colors each time you play it. Every time I play with a different orchestra and a different conductor. The flutiest might do something differently, or the cello section might bring out a sound that I’ve not heard before. That makes a piece feel fresh each time.”

Pine’s love for the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto has never diminished.

“There’s a famous quote from the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who was Brahms’ best friend and collaborator. Joachim was the teacher of the teacher of my teacher. Joachim said ‘The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.’”

“I think that’s a true assessment,” added Pine. “The Mendelssohn is so intimate a touching. The Bruch and the Mendelssohn are the two violin concerts that are studied by young children. The technical demands are not as over the top in terms of strength and stamina and the pyrotechnical tricks as in the other Romantic concertos. That, however, doesn’t mean that they are simpler or easier. It’s just that physically, younger people can handle them. It’s the work of a lifetime to tease out the meaning of every single phrase and make every note special.”

Pine pointed out that Mendelssohn broke with the Classical tradition in the way that he handled the cadenzas for the soloist.

“In the Classical period,” explained Pine, “the orchestra would come to a big fermata and then the cadenza for the soloist would take over and often improvise. Towards the end of the cadenza, the soloist would do a trill and the orchestra would come back in. In the Mendelssohn the soloist’s cadenza flows right out of the orchestra and carries on, and after a set of arpeggios the orchestra enters right in the middle of them. So there is an elision both in and out of the cadenza. It’s an integrated event and not the kind of cadenza that Classical music had offered. I play the cadenza that Mendelssohn wrote. I don’t take the liberty of improvising whatever I want. That would be like deleting Mendelssohn’s music, and I can’t do that.”

“In the Mendelssohn, the soloist starts playing right away,” noted Pine. “That was a bit radical. So you don’t have a long orchestral introduction, which had been the norm. All of the main themes of the movement are stated in the opening tutti section. So it is like the overture to an opera or a musical where your ear is introduced to the primary material and then the soloist comes in and does their thing to it.”

In playing this great concerto, the technical prowess required is stunning, but it is not the main part of what Pine is trying to do.

“We are not there to be athletes, we are there to be artists,” remarked Pine. “The most important thing is to tell a story and take the audience on an emotional journey. If the takeaway for the audience is that a violinist played all those arpeggios cleanly and nailed those high notes, then you know that you didn’t do a good job, because what you are expressing should be so compelling that the audience doesn’t even notice the technique, then you know that you have succeeded.”

The Mendelssohn is also part of Pine's discography.

“I’ve recorded the Mendelssohn concerto on the Cedille label,” said Pine, “and I wrote the liner notes. Some people think that because Mendelssohn was raised in a family that was well-off, and he didn’t have to go through personal crises, that his music is less profound than others, because he didn’t have to go through struggles. But that opinion has always bothered me. Why do we have to elevate negativity? I think that great joy is just as profound as great sadness. Mendelssohn was so in touch with beauty that his music in this concerto can touch your heart.”

The second half of the concert will feature Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. It was last performed by the VSO under Music Director Salvador Brotons in 2009.

“I did the Shostakovich first with the Montevideo Orchestra in Uruguay and later with The Balearic Symphony in Mallorca,” wrote Brotons in an email message. “It is a phenomenal symphony, and one of Shostakovich’s best. It is a very biographical work, because Shostakovich wrote it just after Stalin’s death. He hated the dictator. The first movement describes the painful feelings of Russian society versus the unhuman power. The second movement, which is very fast and difficult, depicts Stalin’s brutality.. In last two movements, Shostakovich’s name is coded into the music with the letters DSCH (Re Mib Do Si) - himself versus the power. It is amazing how the composer faces the society. His theme appears almost incessantly.”

“It is a very intense and deeply felt piece of music,” concluded Brotons. “I am looking forward to conducting it in Vancouver. I hope the audience will understand the message.”