Fanfare Magazine
July/August, 2007

Rachel Barton Pine on Her All-Time Hero, Maud Powell
by Robert Maxham

I first became acquainted with Maud Powell’s playing through 78s my father’s violin teacher had lent our family—Souvenir and Humoresque. And, as I mention in my review, I was surprised by how much Powell found in these pieces. In what recordings did Rachel Barton Pine first hear Powell’s playing? Had she read Karen Shaffer’s book when she first heard Powell? “Actually, I first became acquainted with Maud Powell when I read Karen Shaffer’s biography of her. It wasn’t till after that that I heard a CD collection of Maud’s re-mastered 78s.” So she didn’t become acquainted through the old 78s? “No, not in their original form. The CDs were reissues, and more recently her recordings have been re-released again on Naxos, with a few extra tracks that were discovered later. It was that first set from how many years ago, though, that I started listening to. But, honestly, while her playing is very dynamic and compelling and inspiring, it was really reading about her life—her opinions about music, her values, the activities that she engaged in—it was Maud as a person and as a musician, rather than as a performer, who drew me to herself. Hers was such an amazing life. Unlike most of her female peers at the time, who would go off to Europe and study, then come back and make a debut and tour for a couple of years, only to get married and settle down as some town’s local music teacher, Maud actually loved her art so much that she dedicated her life to the violin. She was lucky to meet Sousa’s manager when she was on tour with the Sousa band; they fell in love and he became her manager and toured with her. So she was able to have both a marriage and a career. As I said, she was lucky, because she had chosen to keep going with the violin despite what she assumed would be the need to give up marriage. I don’t think she didn’t want to get married, but she loved the violin so much. She gave what we would now call “outreach” performances instead of resting between concerts in big cities. She would find a small town half way between and play several classical concerts and talk about the pieces from the stage, group them into sets with like aesthetics—for example, a sequence of pieces based on dance forms, or pieces from a particular country, or pieces that were more vocal in nature—to help the audience learn how to listen to the violin. She’d make use of Vieuxtemps’s arrangement of St. Patrick’s Day and popular tunes in their dressed-up classical versions to break down barriers. (Vieuxtemps had done the same thing with Yankee Doodle on his American tours.) And she was dedicated to the music of her time, cutting-edge modern pieces, like the Dvorak, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky concertos, which she premiered and championed (in the United States)—and many, many works by American composers. That wasn’t just contemporary music, but American music to boot, at a time when American composers were looked down upon. It was very radical of her to encourage these composers and bring before the public the most worthy of their output. She also played the music of women composers. And she was the first white performer on any instrument to play the works of black composers—for example, she included her own arrangements of Negro spirituals in her recital programs. In fact, her recording of Deep River is the first recording of any version. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor wrote his Concerto for her. Then there are fun things, such as her being the first woman to break the barrier between men’s quartets and ladies’ quartets—she formed a string quartet incorporating both genders. So it was just a remarkable life.”

Pine feels that her own remarkable life suggests striking parallels. “Yes, some through intent and some through coincidence. For example, my husband’s not my manager—I have the usual New York agent—but he does travel with me all of the time. He owns a computer business, which allows him to supervise all his employees back in the Chicago office from wherever we might be in the world by cell phone and laptop. Whenever I play for the Maud Powell Society, the ladies say, ‘Oh, Rachel and Greg—it’s just like Maud and Sunny.’ I think there are very few artists—at least women artists—whose husbands come along 100 percent of the time. So I’m very lucky, because, just like Maud, I’m able to have a marriage and a career. Another parallel: I’ve been interested in the works of black composers for a long time. You know, I recorded an album in 1997 of works by 18th- and 19th-century black composers from Europe and the Caribbean. (Çedille 03, 21:5) and have played pieces by a number of 19th- and 20th-century African-American composers. And my foundation, the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation, was formed in 2001 to fund an instrument loan program and grants for education and career. That was in response to my growing up in a financially struggling household—I’d been the primary breadwinner from the age of 14, responsible for the rent, utilities, and groceries—all of those things. Needless to say, it was difficult to afford the things I needed to further my music education and career goals. And so my Foundation helps young people in similar circumstances to those I experienced. But ever since my album of works by black composers was released, I’ve gotten a steady stream of requests for this repertoire from students, parents, and teachers, because most of it is currently out of print, and those pieces that are in print aren’t available in editions suitable pedagogically for study by youngsters. So my Foundation decided on a curriculum project, The String Student’s Library of Black Composers. We’ve already secured the same publisher that publishes the Suzuki method, so the series will have both high visibility and wide reach. The series itself will consist of volumes for beginners through advanced students, presenting three centuries of works by black composers from around the world: Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. I feel that I’m continuing in Maud’s footsteps in what she did to obtain deserved recognition for composers of African descent. Of course, finally, I’m interested in music of all eras, from the Baroque period to the present day. Maud, too, played repertoire from across the centuries.

Another parallel lies in Pine’s dedication to outreach. “In fact, I’ve been doing that for many years. From the age of 12 or so, I’ve been a big rock-music fan, particularly the heavy-metal genre, my absolute favorite. I even recorded an album of some of my favorite heavy-metal songs; but first I started going on rock radio stations—that started around 1995 or so—when I was in town playing concertos—I’d play a little Metallica or Led Zeppelin and follow up with some Paganini and talk to my peers about how cool classical music is. A few points I always make: first, just as rock is an umbrella term for a wide variety of genres, from things that are very much on the lighter side, like, say, Celine Dion, all the way to things on the heavy end of the spectrum, you know, AC/DC and beyond—in just the same way, classical music is an umbrella term for all kinds of different styles and genres. And so if you’ve heard Pachelbel’s Canon in a dentist’s waiting room and think it’s pretty boring, you might like a Mahler symphony, which would be the equivalent of the AC/DC end of the spectrum. Another message is that, just because a lot of classical music is historic, it’s not museum music. The great composers speak directly to the human heart, to the soul, and to the human emotions, which have always been and always will be the same. Young people these days listen to rock music of the past. And I grew up listening to Jimmy Hendrix, among others. These were dead composers—I didn’t live during the 1960s. So how is that different from playing Tchaikovsky, who’s a dead composer? We didn’t live during the 1800s, but if the music speaks to you, it speaks to you. And the last point I always make is that I had the great honor of meeting my favorite heavy-metal bands—whether it was hanging out backstage with Megadeth and learning that the lead guitarist was really into the Ysaÿe violin sonatas or hanging out with Slash from Guns and Roses and learning that he was really into Bach—many of these experiences have shown me that a lot of the great rock musicians were classically trained and often consider their music to be classically influenced—and many of them listen to classical music. So if you like Van Halen and Van Halen likes Paganini, you ought to give Paganini a try. Anyway, my activities expanded from going on rock radio stations to recording an album on acoustic violin of a number of my favorite rock songs and interspersing a number of fast and exciting classical pieces in between them. Now orchestras will sometimes send me to local bars or cafés, where I present a concert of a similar mix of music. Of course, performing rock music on the violin isn’t an end in itself—I’m not what you’d call a crossover artist. But I use these recognizable songs as a point of entry for people, to lead them into classical music. The final step is encouraging them to come to a real classical performance. Sometimes orchestras will ask me after the concerto to play something of a non-classical nature as an encore. And I always say, ‘Well, rock doesn’t need more fans than it already has, so there’s no point in playing a rock piece for the classical people; and if there are any of my rock fans in the audience, I want to play another classical piece for them, because this is the chance. I think of all that as following in Maud’s footsteps.”

There are other parallels, too. “Yes. Maud was a native Illinoisian, just like me. She was born an hour and a half west of Chicago in little Peru, Illinois. She grew up in Aurora, Illinois, which is best known as the site of Wayne’s World. She had her earliest violin lessons in Chicago, taking the train in from the suburbs until she was a teenager and went off for her finishing training in Europe. Her European training even parallels mine, because she studied with Joachim as her major European teacher, and I took some of my finishing training in Berlin with a student of a student of Joachim. So I feel close to her and that part of her life too.”

Why has her name been largely forgotten? “There are three possible explanations, and maybe the reason’s a combination of the three. First, she didn’t live into the electric recording era, as Heifetz did; so she didn’t make any full-length concerto albums with orchestra that would remain in the consciousness of the next generations. Second, she made a number of extremely tasteful arrangements and transcriptions, but she didn’t write any original numbers as did Kreisler, so she’s not remembered as a composer. Who would remember Vieuxtemps, for example, if he hadn’t composed original pieces? We’ve almost entirely forgotten many great virtuosos, but we remember Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski because they wrote the strongest concertos—and then, of course, we remember that they were also violinists. Third, Maud also didn’t leave a pedagogical legacy. We would never remember Auer the performer except that he had been the teacher of some of the great performers. Maud didn’t have a studio. She probably would have if she’d lived longer—she was only 53 when she died—but she was on the road so much that she couldn’t do both. And so, while she would often give supplemental lessons and was very dedicated to giving advice to any young person who asked for it and very often wrote articles for music journals, she didn’t have a studio of her own with regular students. And, actually, my life so far has paralleled hers, as well. I did have a studio when I was in my late teens, before my concert career became full time; but I haven’t had one since 1995, although I give master classes in almost every city I visit. Someday I’ll have a professorship; right now, I’m too busy touring, but I do everything I can for music education along the way. I serve on a number of boards of trustees and advisory boards for various music schools, and, of course, there’s the work of my foundation. I do give quite a few supplemental lessons and seminars at the American String Teachers Association and other conferences—my first article is going to be published in the ASTA Journal—and I answer e-mail from music students asking for advice about this or that. Anyway, when people ask me who is my favorite violinist or my favorite musician, I can’t answer that question speaking only from the perspective of whose playing do I like best. I try to be inspired by many violinists and incorporate elements from many of my colleagues past and present. But in totality, as a person and as a musical ambassador, Maud Powell is definitely my all-time hero. I would most like to live up to the standards and values that she set, all that she did to promote the arts, and also her seriousness about her art as interpreter, always striving to find deeper and deeper meaning in each of the pieces she played, researching the composers lives. You know, she often wrote her own program notes. I could talk about Maud Powell for hours—she’s my favorite topic!”

Do Powell’s interpretations seem more Powell than composer, in the manner of so many of the period’s violinists? “That’s always such a subjective question to answer—even about oneself. I know from reading about Maud in the music journals from her lifetime, and from reading her own writings, that she was determined to capture the essence of each composer’s individuality. It definitely was not her goal to go out on stage and be herself and that’s it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I would love to have heard Ole Bull—his eccentricity was unique, and I can’t imagine that anything he would have played would have sounded like anything other than Ole Bull—he was great and whatever he did was going to be great. I wouldn’t choose that approach, but there’s nothing wrong with any approach as long as it’s effective. But Maud came from the school of thought that was true to the composer, so she really strove to differentiate French music, say, from German music and even within each country and each composer individually. I believe that was a result of Joachim’s musical values—he didn’t believe in anything showy. In a way, he was almost ascetic. He strove to preserve the purity of the composer’s intent, with nothing of the performer’s ego entering the picture. I think there’s something of a balance to be achieved. Joachim didn’t play all repertoire, and when I’m playing Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, I definitely agree with his approach. But when I’m playing Paganini, as I am this weekend—the Second Concerto—it would be wrong to interpret him like that, because Paganini valued beauty of operatic line and flash for its own fun sensationalism. It’s just like food, I guess—different ethnic cuisines, different parts of meals—desserts and main courses, appetizers, side dishes—music can fall into any of those categories. Brahms is a nice steak, but you wouldn’t want to eat nothing but steak. When I listen to Maud, I feel that I can hear a difference between her aesthetic approaches. We definitely go farther with that these days, because we have the benefit of a hundred more years of musicological thought. When we play Baroque music, we know that we’re not supposed to put in certain kinds of slides, because they didn’t do it in those days. We know what the equipment was and that impacts our approach.”

But then why do violinists who will so readily embrace “authenticity” in performances of Bach recoil from portamentos and rhythmic subtleties in their performances of romantic literature? “I’m glad you brought that up. And I would actually carry that question into the 20th century. When it comes to orchestras, it can be a frustration. Orchestras of the first part of the 20th century would sometimes schmaltz all over Mozart, which can be a little offensive to our sensibilities. Nowadays, they know better than to do that, but now in repertoire where they’re supposed to schmaltz, where you want them to schmaltz, they’re almost inhibited. The piece where I experience this most starkly is the Barber Violin Concerto, which has that 1940s flavor—the juicy Hollywood soundtrack kinds of warm slides and rich sound from the strings. The orchestra almost feels guilty if they put in a slide, and I think, ‘Come on, guys! This is your chance. Go for it!’ But it’s as hard to get them to schmaltz in repertoire as it was to get orchestras a couple of generations ago to cut it out. As a fiddler friend of mine says, we always have to strive to be as multilingual as possible. So Maud’s Bach isn’t done in the way that somebody with an understanding of the 18th century from the 21st-century perspective would play it. But her Bach was definitely very honest. It was thoughtful, had great commitment, and she did everything in her power to give it her own characteristics, very different from how she might play Deep River or a de Beriót showpiece—or anything else.”

How was the repertoire chosen for the tribute album? “There’s an upcoming publication of all of the works dedicated to Maud Powell, with the exclusion of a few concertos, as well as all Maud’s transcriptions. This will be a three-volume series. It was a massive, massive undertaking, especially on the part of Karen Shaffer, who wrote multi-page articles on every single piece and its composer, including all of the review quotes of Maud having played that piece throughout her career, and a complete biography of each composer, many of whom were obscure. Some of the pieces existed in manuscript only, and I served as editor of this sheet music project and supervised entering these manuscripts into the computer. I also corrected the fair copies, and for two of the pieces—Maud’s cadenza to the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Sousa airs—I created a fully edited version with usable fingerings and bowings. Those two pieces are very technically challenging and, since the urtext copies weren’t close to being playable, we decided to publish my editions so that people could use the solutions that I’ve spent many, many hours of my life figuring out as a jumping-off point. For some of the pieces, actually, no manuscripts were to be found—they had to be transcribed from recordings. A couple of students did that work, but I made revisions and corrections.

“I’ve performed a lot of this repertoire often over the last decade. I’ve given recitals at the Maud Powell Festival in Peru, Illinois, to mark Maud’s birthday. Typically my recital tributes to Maud incorporate repertoire from different categories. I haven’t yet recreated one of her actual programs—a concerto with piano, a sonata, a movement of this, a movement of that, some shorter character pieces, and so forth. Instead, I play concerto movements with piano, but not an entire concerto—like those mix-and-match children’s books where you can flip and match the head of a giraffe and the midsection of an ostrich and the feet of an elephant. I choose from among concertos that Maud premiered or concertos that she championed or was affiliated with in one way or another. I also draw upon repertoire that she premiered, that was written for her, or that she transcribed. From these, I try to choose pieces that aren’t part of the normal canon. For example, Maud often played the Franck Sonata, but I wouldn’t go into a Maud Powell recital playing the Franck Sonata, because you can hear me play that at any recital. I would choose repertoire that would be a little more special and unique. Beside this group of Maud Powell fans in the town of her birth, there’s another that claims her as their own —the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame in the Fox River Valley area of Chicago’s western suburbs. The group, which started a few years back, honors all kinds of artists who came from the region; Maud was in the first group of inductees. So I gave a Maud Powell tribute recital in Aurora, Illinois. And last year, I gave a Maud Powell tribute recital in Washington, DC, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Leonard Slatkin came to that recital. When I had thanked him for coming, he said that Maud’s arrangements were wonderful and that she really was the female Fritz Kreisler. After he left the room, I kicked myself. I should have said, ‘No, Fritz Kreisler was the male Maud Powell,’ because Maud Powell came first and Kreisler and his generation looked up to Maud Powell. But I’d agree that Powell’s transcriptions are in the top league. I’d been playing many of them.

“So when it came time to make the album, I already knew many of the pieces intimately. But there were some new pieces to choose among, because some works hadn’t been unearthed by Karen until she went to put the sheet music project together. So when I was about to give a Maud Powell tribute recital, I recorded that recital, which included a lot of the works that were contenders for the album. Then I learned all the rest of the pieces in the sheet-music collection well enough to play them in my living room into a tape recorder. So three categories, the play-throughs in my living room, a recent Maud Powell tribute performance, and some of Maud’s own recordings of this repertoire, comprised every work dedicated to her and every work arranged by her. I submitted all of that to Jim Ginsberg of Çedille Records. Certainly there were pieces that I couldn’t live with omitting from the album. But for a number of others, I would have been happy to go in any direction. And it was so impossible to say which ones to cut because I loved them all. So I decided to let Jim make the final decision—he would be coming at it more objectively, hearing most of these pieces for the first time.”

Had she considered playing de Bériot’s Seventh Concerto, which Powell had recorded? “Certainly it would be fun to record a concerto with piano in the way that people used to hear them—it would be an absolute blast! But there was already too much repertoire with the transcriptions and the dedications. Jim wanted to keep it down to one CD—and I wasn’t even going to be able to do all of those other two kinds of pieces. But none of the other repertoire can really be considered rejects. I feel sad that this or that one didn’t make it. But this is probably the best mix of repertoire—slow pieces, fast pieces, light pieces, serious pieces. And it leaves the door open for other artists to make their own Maud Powell tribute albums or include some of her works in mixed-encore type albums or whatever else—there are some pieces still waiting for their first recording. I’ll be very excited to see others pick up the ball and join the Maud Powell fan club.”

In her performances of some of these pieces, Pine seems to deploy some of Powell’s own expressive devices (although she doesn’t sound much like her). If she were simply playing other miniatures from this period, would she adopt this manner? “You’ve noticed that I put in quite a few expressive slides. Of course, the slides that Maud and her contemporaries made would have been 10 or 15 percent slower than mine. If I were to slide 100 percent as much as they did 100 years ago, it would be disturbing to the modern listener. Doing about 80 percent of that slide conjures up for the listener that flavor but still sounds as though I’m living in the 21st century. The ultimate arbiter of interpretive or stylistic decision is always the perspective of my instincts. You can think about things all day, but if what you think doesn’t end up sounding good, who cares what your thoughts are? The brain has to inform the heart, but the heart has to make the final decision. When I play music from this era, I’m going to try to play with a certain number of expressive slides—just as I try to be honest to what Mozart should sound like or what Baroque music should sound like. If I play a piece of Scottish folk music, I make sure it has Scottish timing and inflections, Gaelic ornaments. And if I play Prokofiev, I don’t make big-bellied swells. If I play Schoenberg, I make as few slides as possible, because he railed against the number of slides that musicians of his time put in. It’s all about, ‘What does this music need?’ It’s fun to play music from Maud’s time, because you get to put in all those slides. But as far as copying any of Maud’s exact slides, I absolutely didn’t do that. Eight or 10 years ago, when I was first getting to know this repertoire, I did listen to one or two of her recordings and actually notated every slide, marking which one was overhand, which one was underhand, meaning new finger, old finger. And then I practiced that way a few times. I made a conscious effort not to imitate her exact scheme, but if there was a slide I wanted to do, that I really liked, I didn’t avoid doing it just because she did it. The purpose of that study, though, was to get a sense of how many slides she put in, where within a phrase slides tended to appear. So it was more a matter of getting a sense of the performance practice than of imitating her in a very specific way. I don’t know that there have been any treatises about where musicians of the late 19th century put their slides, even though there have been treatises about where musicians of the 18th century put their ornaments. So in the absence of such a treatise, I had to make that very meticulous study to create for myself a set of guidelines or performance-practice rules. Then I took those rules and, within their boundaries, experimented with slides in all kinds of places and figured out what’s best for my hand, my phrasing, what went along with my interpretation of each piece—what felt right to me, what I liked this year. I think in the Smithsonian there’s a mechanical violin. Someone created a machine from a violin and a bow that would, through the use of various levers and pulleys, play music. Slides were considered to be such an integral part of the music that this machine was designed in such a way that it actually played slides. It sounded absolutely horrible, but I guess they thought you had to have those slides, because that was how music was made.”

What new projects has Pine taken on? “Well, this November, I’m going to be recording the Beethoven Concerto with José Serebrier and the Royal Philharmonic in London, and that will be paired with the first recording of the [Franz] Clement Violin Concerto. It’s not as much of a smoking gun as the Brahms-Joachim pairing, in that the Clement Concerto itself was not as undeniably direct an influence on Beethoven’s Concerto, as Joachim’s was on Brahms’s. However, his Concerto is a beautiful piece, and its relationship with the Beethoven Concerto is absolutely fascinating. Clement, of course, was the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Concerto and his style of playing is very close to what Beethoven wrote in his Concerto. Clement’s Concerto is also in D Major, with an opening tutti of similar length. He bucked the trend of the day, which was to write vehicles for violinists to show off their melodic and technical prowess. In Clement’s Concerto, the violin solo often plays descant over orchestral melodies—radical for its time. His D-Major Concerto premiered exactly one year earlier than Beethoven’s, and for the same occasion, an annual benefit concert for the orchestra of which Clement was concertmaster. Exactly one year later, for the same benefit concert, Clement played Beethoven’s Concerto. A lot of the figurations Beethoven uses in his Concerto were siblings of the figurations in Clement’s Concerto.

“I’m also working on an album of unaccompanied Latin-flavored music, by Spanish composers and Latin-American composers and non-Latino composers in the Latin style—very spicy solo virtuoso pieces for unaccompanied violin. A number of them have never been recorded; and a couple of them are dedicated to me—an Argentinian composer wrote one wonderful tango as a wedding present. And my trio has an album in the can. That’s the Trio Settecento, which formed after the release of our Handel album. Everybody was asking when we were going to be performing, and we enjoyed working together so much on the project that we decided to form a group. Our sound is now vastly different from what it was on the Handel album—I’m very proud of our Handel album, but we simply don’t sound like that anymore. We’re releasing an album of Italian music from the 17th and 18th centuries, and our next recording will be of German music from the 17th and 18th centuries, and then of French repertoire, and then onwards and upwards. My own collection of encores and cadenzas is going to be published, probably at the end of the year, by a major music publishing company.”

What else will she be doing? “Next season, I’ll be giving a series of recitals, including my recital debuts in certain major cities, like New York and Boston. The tour will be sponsored by Çedille Records and will take the same name as the album: ‘The American Virtuosa Tour.’ It won’t be a Maud Powell tribute recital—that type of program is more appropriate for specialized series. I like to think, though, about what she would have played if she had lived today. I’ll be playing John Corigliano’s Sonata along with a Beethoven sonata. Corigliano is such an important current American composer, with whom I’ve had the chance to work personally. I’m also playing a thorny but brilliant work written for me by Augusta Read Thomas.”