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Rachel Barton Pine has come a long way.
Nearly four decades after making her Orchestra Hall debut at age 10 as part of the Illinois Young Performers Competition, dazzling patrons with rendition of Saint-Saëns’ Intro & Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28, the Chicago-based violin virtuoso will appear once again on the storied stage.
On April 24, as part of the CSO MusicNOW series, Pine performs with Mead Composer-in-Residence (and her longtime friend) Jessie Montgomery. The program, titled In Context, features pieces by post-modern American classical composers Richard Einhorn, Julia Perry, Walter Piston and Leonard Bernstein — all of whom have greatly influenced Montgomery and her work.
In a conversation a few weeks before her MusicNOW appearance, Pine talked about her first time playing with the CSO (wearing a light-blue dress, and with barrettes in her hair, she looked like 10 but played like 20 — at least), her formative years with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, her work with Montgomery and more.
What sticks in your mind about the CSO performance you gave at age 10? It was your first major appearance.
I started violin lessons when I was 3. I knew when I was 5 that I was meant to be a violinist. I was just obsessed with the violin. I didn’t feel like someone who played the violin, I felt like being a violinist was my entire identity. It was what I planned to do with my life. Of course, at the age of 5, I had no idea about what a professional career entailed or anything else. I made my debut with an orchestra when I was 7, and I soloed with a handful of orchestras leading up to the performance with the Chicago Symphony [in 1985]. I guess the Chicago Symphony performance was, for me, just a confirmation of my dream. The gorgeous hall, the amazing orchestra — it was a whole different level than some of the good orchestras I’d played with previously. And I was just like, wow, this is such incredible fun. It confirmed for me that yes, this is for sure what I want to do with my life, so I’ve got to keep working as hard as I can to be able to do that.
Was ignorance bliss in a way, since you didn’t yet have a full understanding of the classical music world or the importance of the CSO?
I kind of did by that age. They used to broadcast CSO performances on TV. And I was home-schooled from age 8, at the suggestion of my elementary-school principal. Which sounds like I got expelled, but I promise I didn’t. My entire life consisted of going to school, coming home and practicing as much as I could, and then doing my homework in the car on the way to rehearsal in the suburbs, and eating my dinner in the car on the way back from rehearsal. I had no social life and never a minute to breathe. When I stopped going to school, ironically, it actually saved my social life. Because people were like, oh, you’re not around kids all day. And I’m like, yeah, but now I can actually hang out with kids. Because the academic work takes a lot less time on your own, and I could do my practicing during school hours and play with friends in the afternoon.
We had a much more freeform approach to home-schooling where I had flexibility as to what I learned when I learned it, so that allowed me to watch the Chicago Symphony on TV during the weekdays. I never saw a Saturday-morning cartoon my entire childhood, but we would watch PBS programming featuring the Chicago Symphony. I was watching them play these great orchestral works and concerts from Lincoln Center — things like that.
I really revered the CSO; they were my heroes. When I got on the stage with them, I recognized all their faces from television. So I was very aware of the enormity of the situation. The other thing about home-schooling, of course, is that I had the luxury of time to be super-prepared. Almost over-prepared. So there was no possibility I could make a mistake. And the quality of the playing going on behind me, the tone quality from their instruments and their musicianship — playing with people on that level took me to another level that I could never have achieved in the practice room. And I was like, I want as much of that as I can get, forever.
You’ve been doing this for a long time. How much practice do you still put in each day?
One of the reasons I can get away with less consistency now is that I was completely consistent when I was young. I never missed a day of practice from age 3 to 13. Even if it was my birthday or Christmas or I had the flu, I practiced every single day. My daughter actually just recently celebrated her 2,200th day of practice in a row. Then I went pro when I was 14, in terms of doing professional gigs and becoming concertmaster of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, which I joined when I was 11 and which was such a big part of my life.
It’s funny, nobody ever questions if a kid wants to play video games for eight hours a day. Because that’s fun for them. But for me, playing the violin was super fun, and I wanted to practice eight hours a day. And I really feel like those years I spent between age 11 and 17 in the Civic Orchestra were so incredibly formative. I knew full well that not everybody who might have the skill level to be a soloist would be lucky enough to get the breaks to actually become a soloist.
I wanted to have a backup career path where I could go and play in a good orchestra and still enjoy music the rest of my life. That’s a different skill set. Just because you’re good enough to play concertos doesn’t mean you’ll be doing what you ought to in the orchestral section. So I was studying it seriously. I could be in my room playing a Brahms concerto for many hours, but by instead sitting with the Civic and learning the Brahms symphonies, I understood the music in a different and deeper way.
And working with those great conductors like Georg Solti, who was at the end of his tenure when I first started, and then Daniel Barenboim. He would spend rehearsal after rehearsal with us, hour after hour for many weeks, and then perform with us. And Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez and Leonard Slatkin would come in. So it was really just an incredible opportunity to just learn about the composers, learn about music-making and learn how an orchestra works from the inside, which I then brought to bear on my concerto playing.
To this day, conductors are always remarking that I’m very easy to follow and that I seem to really understand what’s going on with the piece as a whole. And that’s because I learned how to do that from listening to the different sections in the Civic. And sometimes we would have a soloist, so I picked up on what sorts of rubato they might do that you could or couldn’t follow. And I always have in the back of my mind, OK, I might think this sounds good, but is this actually going to fit together with the orchestra? I also made lifelong friends from those years in the Civic. It was such a great blessing.
After more than 30 years of playing professionally, you’re back on the Orchestra Hall stage with Jessie Montgomery in late April.
Yeah. And that’s a pretty rare opportunity to do chamber work with a composer as one of the musicians. And it’s wonderful to see that that even exists these days. Our profession is definitely opening up. It used to be that if you fiddled, you had to stay in the closet because that might make people question your classical integrity. Even when I was coming up as a Baroque violinist, I was told to stay in the closet for a while until I had established my Romantic period bona fides. Now people are so much more comfortable with switch hitters, which is great for those of us that like to do lots of different creative things. My daughter is actually coming up as a violinist and composer. And thanks to the great example Jesse is setting and some of the educational work she’s doing, I think there will be more and more young player-composers coming up.
What’s different for you about being on the CSO stage in light of the history you have with the orchestra and the hall?
There are gorgeous venues all over the world with different aesthetics and different acoustics, but there’s only one Orchestra Hall. It’s my musical home.
