Rachel Barton Pine TESTAMENT Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin J.S. BACH

Rachel Barton Pine has often performed the Sonatas and Partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach in recital, but her 2016 release on Avie is her first studio recording of this essential masterwork for violinists. Using a Baroque bow on a modernized 1742 Guarneri de Gesù violin, Pine plays the Sonatas and Partitas with crisp accentuation, transparent voicing, and a warm tone, much as she does in her concert performances. Her interpretation, which is influenced by period practices but not limited by them, offers clear counterpoint in the sonatas and buoyant dance rhythms in the partitas, and there is little scratchiness in her stopped chords to disrupt the smoothness and transparency of her elegant lines. Pine's depth of feeling and expressive insights into the music keep it from seeming like dry, technical exercises, yet there is none of the overly rhetorical Romantic approach here, either, so this reading does justice to Bach's likely intentions while communicating emotion in a subtle and tasteful manner. Highly recommended. (Blair Sanderson)

Rachel Barton Pine / Academy os St Martin in the Fields / Sir Neville Marriner MOZART Complete Violin Concertos

2014 marked the 90th birthday of Sir Neville Marriner, whose experience and instinct for Mozart here gels with the artistry of the 40-year-old Chicago-born violinist Rachel Barton Pine. All five of Mozart’s violin concertos were composed during the 1770s while he was still in his teens, possibly for himself to perform since at the time he was recognised more as a violinist than as the keyboard player he soon became.

If the concertos have sometimes been underrated simply because of their early provenance, Barton Pine, in league with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the ever-stylish Marriner, reveals that there are subtleties alongside the grace and exuberance that render the music endlessly fascinating and appealing.

Barton Pine’s tone is pure, unadulterated by any extraneous affectation, and is ideally matched to the music’s lucid and chamber-like discourse; she plays her own, tastefully tailored cadenzas, since Mozart and his contemporaries extemporised their cadenzas and wrote nothing down. In the Sinfonia concertante K364 she is partnered by the equally sensitive, again Chicago-born viola-player Matthew Lipman, still in his early 20s and gifted with poise and a warmth of timbre that ideally complement the allure of the set as a whole. (The Telegraph)