Rachel Barton Pine Featured on the Cincinnati Business Courier

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine makes her debut in a “Silk Road” program with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra on Aug. 2, performing the world premiere live performance of a new violin concerto by the Syrian American composer Malek Jandali, which she released on Cedille.

Rachel recently spoke to the Cincinnati Business Courier. “What's interesting about Middle Eastern music is there's such a strong tradition of violin playing in so many of those countries,” she said.

Pine is a busy violinist who dazzles, whether she’s playing classics such as Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto or a new concerto by jazz artist Billy Childs written specifically for her. She had just returned from performing in Finland when we spoke by phone, and she explained the story of how Jandali wrote this concerto.

Besides championing contemporary music, Pine is dedicated to researching historical works and the best practices on how they should be performed. On Aug. 3, she’ll perform a Vivaldi Violin Concerto on her viola d’amore. The instrument emerged in the 1600s, and is played on the shoulder like a violin, but it has no frets and features three Islamic sound holes, she explained. Its resonating strings are also a Middle Eastern device, so one theory is that it was the viola of the Moors, she added.

Read the full piece here.

Find out more about the concerts here.