By David Templeton | From the January/February 2025 issue of Strings
There is an old saying: nothing on the violin is difficult—there are only things that are unfamiliar. For violinist Rachel Barton Pine, the key to her success as a practitioner of historically informed performance practice (HIPP) has relied on her ability to become familiar with difficult things on a regular basis. Her dedication springs from her love of variety.
“I love doing all kinds of classical music,” she says. “Whether we are doing newly written music or stuff written centuries ago—or anything in between—musicians depend on researchers and musicologists to dig up the information we can utilize in crafting our interpretations. Just like with science, we are always discovering new data, which leads to new theories and new understandings of things.”
For musicians, some new understandings can lead to novel artistic challenges. In recording her album Corelli: Violin Sonatas, Op. 5, Pine’s commitment to authenticity was pushed to new levels. Having already adjusted the way she holds the violin for certain pieces—learning the unique playing styles of the Renaissance and Baroque periods—she decided to play the sonatas as Corelli himself would have done. She learned to play while holding the violin against her chest.
The motivation for doing it this way, Pine explains, was the discovery of written descriptions of Corelli playing the violin. She even uncovered drawings of Corelli in the act of performing. “It became very clear that he did not have it up on his shoulder,” Pine says. “He was holding it a bit lower, against his chest. It was pretty amazing.”
While recognizing that authenticity for its own sake is “an empty argument,” Pine became curious about what it might be like to try playing these pieces the same way Corelli did. “I really didn’t know what the result might be,” she admits. “But knowing that Corelli did this, I decided to experiment with it and see what information I could glean.”
The unusual position immediately made her left hand feel more awkward. And not just a little bit. “It was very uncomfortable, but I thought, ‘Who am I to question Arcangelo Corelli? Maybe there’s a point to holding it down here, even if it does make it a little more cumbersome,’ and that turned out to be the case.”
Advertisement
With the violin being lower, she discovered, the bow arm’s relationship to gravity was suddenly altered. “From the exact same equipment,” she says, “you actually have different tone colors that are being produced.” Thus inspired, Pine decided to continue with the experiment. “Knowing that certain things were more awkward with the left hand gave me information about what tempos were and weren’t comfortable for the different movements,” she says. “In the end, I did become quite comfortable with it. My left hand got used to how to manage it, until it felt totally natural.”
The results, she says, have become genuinely rewarding. “What was really fascinating was that the first time I performed that way with my ‘period-instruments trio,’ a lot of longtime fans of our group immediately noticed the difference in sound,” Pine recalls, referring to Trio Settecento, founded over 25 years ago, “even though I was using the exact same violin, the same bow, and the same strings as I always did. So obviously, there was something there. It was a fun challenge, but also, it was pretty transformative for my understanding of the music I’ve been playing for so many decades.”
Not only did it introduce Pine—who’s loved Corelli’s music since first playing his Christmas Concerto as a child—to a deeper appreciation of Corelli and his sonatas, acquiring and adopting the composer’s own performance technique unlocked a whole new level of potential for her instrument. “It’s wonderful to hear that the violin, with just a few adjustments, can produce a noticeably different voice,” she says.
Pine now holds the rare distinction of being able to play the violin with four markedly different techniques. In addition to the “Corelli style,” there is the “normal” style—employing a chin rest—and the Baroque style, when she puts her head to the right of the tailpiece, without any chin rest, and generally uses a Baroque bow and gut strings.
Then there’s the Renaissance violin style, which she’s been using for the last 20 years, requiring her to play down on the arm when performing music from the 1500s and early 1600s. “And boy, did that feel awkward and foreign when I first started doing it,” she allows. “It was totally humbling to not be able to get a good sound or decent intonation on a one-octave scale in the first position. It really put me in my place. I was like, ‘What’s going on here? I can play all 24 Paganini caprices in a single evening, but I can’t play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the Renaissance violin?’”
She eventually figured it out and says she’s been doing it for so long now that it feels entirely natural. “I imagine that a decade from now, the Corelli chest hold will feel like second nature,” she adds.
Advertisement
As much as Pine enjoys performing, she thoroughly enjoys the research as well, because with every new discovery comes new challenges and opportunities. “Absolutely, but the intellectual is always in service of the emotional,” she says. “One of the really transformational things about this recording is that I improvised the entire time I was making the album.”
In a sharp departure from her usual approach to recording, where every detail is planned out and played the same way in every take—including the decorative grace notes and ornaments that are traditionally improvised when performing in the Baroque style—Pine allowed herself to improvise the sonatas’ ornaments while in the studio. The risk, of course, was that no two takes of a particular piece would sound the same, presenting a potential challenge to the recording technicians, who often “build” a piece by patching together the best parts of separate takes.
Though it isn’t a customary part of her recording process, improvisation is a skill Pine has always been comfortable with. “I started doing Baroque improvisation, creating my own ornaments, when I was 14,” she says, noting that she might have been the only teenager in the entire country, at that point, who was doing historically informed performance practice. “Once I became more fluent in the language—and frankly, a bit more brave—I would start to just make up the ornaments onstage. There’s an advantage to doing that. It’s not just about the personal satisfaction of knowing that you can or knowing that you did. It’s more about being open to spontaneous inspiration—because something that you planned the week before might not best fit what you are feeling that day.”
Even so, whenever she was in the studio, she always preplanned the ornaments for her recording sessions. “I’ve made a number of Baroque albums, and I’ve always found ornaments that I particularly liked, and I’d practice them, so all the takes would match,” she says. “I’d try to play the ornaments exactly the same way on every take. But my daughter, who is a very serious composer and who teaches a class in classical improvisation, went, ‘Mom, that’s not going to sound as beautiful if you don’t allow yourself to be creative in the recording.’ She convinced me, so with the Corelli album, I did improvise.”
Advertisement
It helped that she was accompanied on the project by a group of accomplished historical performance experts. From her own Trio Settecento, the album includes John Mark Rozendaal on Baroque cello and viola de gamba and David Schrader on forte piano, positive organ, and harpsichord, along with YouTube star Brandon Acker on lute and guitar. And in addition to playing her own unaltered 1770 Nicola Gagliano violin, Pine brought her similarly un-modernized 1774 Gagliano viola d’amore to the recording of Sonata No. 12.
She points out that both instruments have tops made from the same tree. “It was a sibling reunion,” she says, adding that because of the mathematically mindboggling number of instrumental combinations the four musicians had to choose from during the recording process, they were able to be extremely creative. “Our album doesn’t sound like anybody else’s. We certainly don’t think ours is the ultimate choice, but it’s the one we collectively enjoyed creating together.”
And because of Pine’s commitment to improvisation, fully supported by the team, the album is, by definition, unlike any other recording of Corelli’s sonatas. “Every take was different. Every ornament was different,” she says. “I didn’t worry about whether each one was the best possible ornament. I let that go. I decided that you have to trust your experience and trust your instincts. Anything you do that comes from the heart is going to work.”
That said, improvising in the studio did require a significantly higher level of concentration and focus than the average recording session. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted at the end of the day, working on any other album,” Pine says. “But it was totally worth it. There is just a true freshness that I feel was captured on this record. It’s so much closer to what you’d get in a performance than something that is beautifully played but preplanned.”
In the end, she thinks simply enjoying and sharing the beauty of Corelli’s writing should be the primary goal when approaching these works. “If you are thinking of taking on the Corelli sonatas,” Pine says, “don’t be overly troubled by all my talk about holding the violin this way or that way. Just play them the way that feels best to you.”
Advertisement
