It’s been more than 10 years, Rachel Barton Pine said, since she’s played South Florida, the last time being in an appearance with the Florida Philharmonic.
In the meantime, her hero status in her native Chicago has only grown, and in that city, she’s one of the leading lights of classical music (and thrash metal, too, but that’s another story). The full house at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Recital Hall found out why in Pine’s concert March 21, which was the fifth in the six concerts in the second season of the Distinguished Artists Series founded by PBAU violin professor Patrick Clifford.
Clifford scored a real coup by getting a recital from Pine, who was accompanied by an excellent pianist, Matthew Hagle. And with all due respect to the PBAU series, this recital should have been followed up by other appearances in the area — at the Kravis as well as in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Stuart, for instance —because this was not an ordinary concert: This was a visitation from a master musician who in addition to her tremendous technique, has thought long and hard about the business of programming, and who by doing so makes even the oldest of chestnuts sound fresh.
It’s hard to find something that fits that description more than “Brahms’s Lullaby,” as it is still familiarly known, though if you’re keeping track, it’s the Wiegenlied (Op. 49, No. 4) from a set of five songs under that opus number. To open the second half of her recital, Pine performed an Albert Spalding arrangement of this familiar work as part of a set of four lullabies, having become interested in the idea after the birth of her daughter (who after the concert could be seen perched on Pine’s knee as she signed autographs); eventually, she said in remarks to the audience, she had a database of some 150 lullabies.
After playing the Brahms with tenderness but not a trace of schmaltz, she played the Rêve d’Enfant (Op. 14) of the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who wrote it on the birth of his son Antoine in 1901. This is a lovely and exquisite piece, and Pine brought it to life with gorgeous coloring and wonderful tone, particularly on the G-string in the reprise of the main theme. The third lullaby, British composer Rebecca Clarke’s piece of that name from 1918, is a pretty piece with a dark modal flavor that Pine brought out skillfully, which reminded the audience that one of Pine’s strengths is her enthusiasm for little-known but worthy literature.
And the fourth lullaby could not have made that point better: Mother and Child (No. 2) from a suite by William Grant Still. There is no more scandalously underappreciated American composer than Still, a pioneering African-American who was a major figure in his own day but by the end of his life in 1978 had seen his music retreat to the margins of the repertory. But this work, from 1943, while redolent of the popular music of its day, is never over the top, and Pine clearly relished playing it, sweeping into its primary theme with power but not gush; the whole performance had a feeling of deep warmth. Call it the love of mother for child personified in sound.
Pine began the concert with two sonatas, the Schubert Grand Duo (in A, D. 547), and the Sonata No. 1 of Sergei Prokofiev (in F minor, Op. 80).
The Schubert, written in 1817, is a masterwork that deserves to be better-known, even given the number of recordings and performances it’s had. Pine played this four-movement work spotlessly, with two things above all on display: Her spot-on intonation right from the beginning — that initial C-sharp, and then the theme, get played flat all the time, but not here — and her astonishingly accurate fingers. This is a hugely difficult sonata, with a second movement a virtual perpetual-motion blizzard that demands daring and bravura, which doesn’t come off if the notes aren’t precisely played.
But Pine had no problem nailing every single note and giving the movement foot-stamping forward motion. In the third movement (Andantino), which begins with a simple song over a plain, hushed piano background, Pine again played every note in that main theme perfectly in tune, which made the music’s sudden key changes that much more surprising and fulfilling. Pianist Hagle was terrific throughout this sonata, which is a duo in the fullest sense of the word. The pianist is required to play a great deal of virtuosic material, and he did so with aplomb.
Pine prefaced her performance of the next work, the Prokofiev Sonata No. 1, with a reference to current events in Russia and Ukraine, which added a Cold War listening filter to the experience (for what it’s worth, I suppose Prokofiev could now be referred to as a Ukrainian composer, having grown up in Sontsovka). The famous “wind over the grave” scales in the first and fourth movements were brilliantly played by Pine, but what made this Prokofiev especially distinctive is her feeling for the composer’s melodic power.
After the subterranean trills of the opening measures, flitting amid the black poles of low-register octaves in the piano, Pine played the violin’s first long line with a wonderful sense of opening up, stretching it out just a bit to let the severe beauty of that phrase lodge in the memory. And her chords in this movement were also exactly in tune, which added weight and gravity to the music.
In the second movement, she was ferocious and uncompromising, and in the third, amid Hagle’s delicately played wandering notes, she again brought out the strength of Prokofiev’s melodic writing. The two ended the sonata in exciting fashion with a propulsive, vigorous account of the finale in which its odd rhythms were clearly articulated before the return of the graveyard scales.
The last work on the program was Cesar Franck’s Violin Sonata, written for Ysaÿe’s wedding in 1886 as a present, and since then one of the favorite works of violinists and audiences everywhere. Pine and Hagle gave it a wonderful reading, with Hagle shining in the monstrously difficult second movement, which requires him to roam all over the keyboard in virtuoso style and then pull back and give sheets of sound as a backdrop to the violin.
All of Pine’s various excellences were here, from sumptuous tone to flawless intonation, and she has a special ability to make the music her own, to make it sound like her own personal statement (particularly here in the fourth movement); you can only do that if you have mastery of the material, and she does, and so this Franck was a triumph.
Pine discussed the violin she plays, a 1742 Guarneri once owned by the Austrian violinist Marie Soldat, who in her teens was mentored by Brahms. “This violin got to jam with Johannes Brahms,” she said, to a delighted audience response of laughter and applause. The violin was owned before that by the Italian virtuoso Antonio Bazzini, known today only for his Dance of the Goblins, a flashy, charming encore. As Pine pointed out before she played it — superbly — as her encore, Bazzini undoubtedly wrote the piece on that very violin.
This was the kind of concert that every audience member wants to attend: Fabulous playing, interesting repertoire, good stage chatter — it was nourishing and uplifting in every important way. Why in the world she’s not regularly heard in South Florida during the season is a mystery I can’t unlock, but here’s hoping it’s much sooner than 10 years more before we hear her again.