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Rachel Barton Pine Celebrates Mozart's Birthday

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine

This past January 27th would have been Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 259th birthday. To celebrate, virtuoso violinist and Crossover favorite, Rachel Barton Pine, released a CD of his five violin concertos.

At the time Mozart wrote these concertos, in his late teens, he was just showing the signs of his genius as an orchestral composer. In 2011, just three weeks after the birth of her first daughter, Pine showed the signs of performance genius - not to mention endurance - by performing all five of the concertos in a single evenings concert. It was that experience which lead her to record this disc, already her 24th release.

On the CD, Rachel performs with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Marriner.  All the music was there for her, with the exception of the cadenzas, for which Mozart left no written material.  Although many great violinists have gone on to write and have published cadenzas for these works, Pine prefers instead to play her own, saying that gives her the chance to present the most personal and organic expression of her relationship with the music.  Her cadenzas for these and other works have been published as well.

Jill speaks with Rachel about the CD and her thoughts on the music, and we'll wet your whistle with excerpts for the violin concertos, as well as playing the entire Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat, K.364, which also appears on the disc.

-A3g

Crossover with Jill Pasternak airs each Saturday morning at 1130am on WRTI-FM, with an encore airing the following Friday evening at 7 on WRTI-HD2.  Both airings can be heard on the All-Classical web stream at wrti.org.

It's his parents' fault. For Joe's sixth birthday, they gave him a transistor radio. All of a sudden, their dreams of having a doctor or lawyer (or even a fry cook) in the family went down the tubes.