Rachel Barton Pine champions José White’s violin concerto

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine has garnered considerable acclaim as one of the Chicago area’s top classical soloists but less widely known is her work as a musical advocate for overlooked works from the past, especially those by Black composers.

Under the auspices of the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation, the violinist began the Music by Black Composers project in 2001, long before diversity and inclusivity efforts swept across the classical world following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police.   

What started the whole initiative was Pine’s 1997 recording on the Cedille Records label titled Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th & 19th Centuries. The release featured four nearly unknown composers, including those of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St. Georges, who has gained considerable attention in recent years, and José White, an Afro-Cuban composer who studied in France.

“I was super-excited, because I had fallen in love with the music,” Pine said. “What was unexpected was the response to the album.” Though she was in her early 20s and little known at the time, the violinist garnered enthusiastic reviews in national publications like the New York Times and Gramophone magazine.

Pine has continued to champion the concertos since, and she will perform White’s concerto and a movement from Niccolò Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7 (the work she performed for her CSO subscription debut in 1997), during an Aug. 18 concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival. The program, led by guest conductor Jonathan Rush, will also feature Hector Berlioz’s famed Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14.

Pine has been a semi-regular performer with the CSO since she won the Illinois Young Performers Competition in 1985, a televised event in which she performed a concerto with famed guest conductor Erich Leinsdorf when she was just 10 years old. As the winner, she went on to serve as soloist for a series of eight youth concerts, making friends with some of the orchestra members along the way. “It was a great professional experience to have to maintain a piece of repertoire at a high level across many months,” she said.

That fall, at age 11, she became a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s pre-professional training orchestra, where she remained for six years. In 1992, when she was serving as the orchestra’s concertmaster, she took part in a special concert with conductor Michael Morgan devoted to Black composers. Pine served as soloist for Chevalier J.J.O. de Meude-Monpas’ Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, which she would later include on the 1997 album.

“It opened my eyes,” she said of the program, “to this treasure trove, really, of these lesser-known works that were absolutely first rate, and way back then when I was so young, I wasn’t thinking of issues of representation or inclusion or social justice. Literally, just as a fan of classical music, I was ravenous for all the good music, and here was some great music that had been overlooked for so long.”

Following that event, she began doing research at Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, which was founded in 1983. An associate library and archives was established in 1990, with a collection of manuscripts, photographs, recordings and other materials related to the role the Black music plays in world culture. That investigative work led to the 1997 recording, which, as noted, attracted considerable attention. “The young violinist Rachel Barton handles the concertos’ varied demands with unaffected aplomb, performing this music lovingly rather than dutifully,” wrote music critic David Mermelstein in the New York Times.

Afterward, Pine received invitations to take part in diversity panels, for which she quickly admits she felt completely under-qualified. She treated the events as listening opportunities and information-gathering sessions. One thing she learned is that some people in the Black community saw classical music as “white music” and believed that it wasn’t a “Black thing to do,” notions she immediately realized were misconceptions.    

“People like me,” she said, “who read research journals for fun knew that there had been all-Black orchestras in America the 1800s that were the equivalent of the Negro baseball leagues and that Frederick Douglass was a very accomplished violinist and Coretta Scott King had a degree in violin. So, clearly violin is a very Black thing to do.” 

All these experiences led her to organize Music by Black Composers with an advisory board of music professionals across the country. Early projects included publishing educational volumes of sheet music by Black composers meant to supplement standard works by Bach and Mozart. “It’s been so gratifying to see students of all races and ethnicities embracing this music,” Pine said, “because it’s just good, catchy stuff, and teachers are so excited to have fresh melodies and different kinds of rhythms.”

Music by Black Composers (its website can be found at musicbyblackcomposers.org) has a host of other resources, including a directory of nearly 500 Black living and historic composers, with contact information for those still active, as well as a children’s coloring book highlighting 40 Black composers from the 1700s to now.  

In September 2022, Pine and Cedille Records released a 25^th-anniversary edition of Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th & 19th Centuries, with an important change. This new version included a recording of Florence Price’s 1951 Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The score for the work was thought to be lost in 1997, but was later rediscovered. Price, who fell into virtual obscurity after her death in 1953, has experienced an extraordinary revival in the last decade or so, quickly becoming recognized as one of the most important American composers of the 20th century.

Removed from the album was the concerto by Chevalier de Meude-Monpas, whom later research revealed was actually not Black. “Then it was kind of the record it should have been in ’97, only musicology was where it was, and you did the best you could,” Pine said of the updated recording.  

Still highlighted on the 2022 re-release is White (1836-1918), whom Pine called a “spectacular find of the project.” Born in Cuba, the composer’s father was Spanish and his mother as Afro Cuban. With the help of noted composer American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the budding talent studied at the Paris Conservatoire, winning the 1856 First Grand Prize. He went on to perform globally, including two appearances with the New York Philharmonic. “He had just a stellar solo career,” Pine said. “When he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic, the reviews said this is the best violinist to yet cross our shores. He was absolutely compared to [Pablo de] Sarasate.”    

Jose White wrote approximately 30 works, with his most famous being his Violin Concerto, and many had a Latin American flavor. “He didn’t write quartets or symphonies,” Pine said, “but like colleagues [Henri] Vieuxtemps and [Henryk] Wieniawski, he wrote many works for violin with piano accompaniment — short virtuoso pieces.”

According to Pine, White’s Violin Concerto sounds “completely European” but is written in his distinctive voice with “gorgeous melodies” and myriad technical demands, including unusually fingered octaves, that top anything found in the famously challenging music of Paganini. She believes the work is the equal of concertos by Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski, but it can suffer from what she sees as misguided comparisons by some listeners. 

“They’ll learn that it is a romantic concerto, and they will say, ‘Well, it’s no Brahms,’” the violinist said. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s not trying to be.’ The Wieniawski [concerto] is also no Brahms, but it’s great for what it is. You can’t have only your entrée. You also need your dessert and your side dishes and all the different kinds of musicmaking.”

After she released her 1997 album, Pine was hopeful that at least a few orchestras would want the present White’s concerto, but nearly all were afraid to program it because it was almost unknown. But all that changed after the death of Floyd and the resultant surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. When the COVID-19 shutdown came to end, her management began to get calls from ensembles eager to perform the work. “They were specifically wanting me to come and play the José White [Concerto], and I was like ‘Oh, my gosh, it is finally happened after all these years of so many of us being on the front lines of diversity work.’ I just couldn’t be more thrilled.”

Pine is confident that this work and the other concertos on her Black composers album will enjoy sustained performances going forward. “I don’t think people,” she said, “are ever going to want to go back to being denied all this wonderful music that was previously closed off to them as audience members and performers.”