Pine Presents Concertos Worthy of More Attention

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the beginning of this month, Avie Records released its latest album featuring violinist Rachel Barton Pine. The album is devoted to two concertos, both of which get less attention than they deserve. These are presented in chronological order, beginning with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 53 concerto in A minor, which always seems to lurk in the shadows behind the far more popular Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor. This is followed by the violin concerto composed by Aram Khachaturian, who, ironically, was born one year before the year of Dvořák’s death (1904). This was actually a moderately popular concerto during my student days in Cambridge, Massachusetts; but that may have been due to the strong Armenian community in neighboring Watertown.

On this album Pine performs with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams. Abrams was born in Berkeley and began studying with Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco at the age of twelve. He dropped out of the public school system prior to middle school but received a Bachelor’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at the age of eighteen, after which he studied conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music. My first listening encounter came when he conducted the annual program of music by Ludwig van Beethoven for the Summer and the Symphony San Francisco Symphony series in July of 2013. He is currently Music Director and Conductor for the Britt Music & Arts Festival Orchestra.

My first recital encounter with Pine took place when she appeared as a guest in The Artist Sessions, an occasional series of “close encounters between musicians and audiences” organized by pianist Lara Downes. Prior to that, I had written on Examiner.com about her performance on the Native Informant album in the Naxos American Classics series featuring works by Arab-American Mohammed Fairouz. As a result, this recent album provided my first encounter with Pine’s concerto work.

As may be inferred from my opening paragraph, I tend to greet any opportunity to listen to either of these concertos as a welcome one. If I have a preference, it is for the Dvořák, perhaps because I am beginning to feel a bit saturated with the cello concerto! Both Pine and Abrams clearly relish the Czech influences in the composer’s rhetoric, even if the thematic material is not as “folk based” as it is in other compositions. Khachaturian’s Armenian rhetoric is more straightforward. Nevertheless, the almost incessant repetition of the opening motif may well be a prankish nod to the repetitive opening of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 10 piano concerto in D-flat major. (Prokofiev completed that concerto in 1912, while Khachaturian composed his concerto in 1940.)

Taken as a whole, this is a thoroughly enjoyable album, which is likely to enjoy future listening encounters while I wait for opportunities to listen to both of these concertos in concert performances!