Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist through and through. As a three year-old, the precocious youngster pestered her bemused parents for lessons following a performance by string students at her family’s church – and by the time she was five, she was ‘self-identifying’ not as someone who plays the violin, but as a violinist. ‘I had no concept of career,’ she says. ‘But I knew that was what I was meant to do with my life. That was my calling.’
True to her word, Pine never wavered from this belief. For her, the violin wasn’t just a means of entertainment, but a way to ‘nurture your soul and uplift your spirit’. By the time she was eight, and practising at her own instigation for many hours a day, her primarydutifully taken on by her mother, that allowed Pine to up the ante to eight hours of practice per day and to make her solo debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of ten, before becoming the youngest ever gold medal winner of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in 1992. This strong parental support is more remarkable considering neither of Pine’s parents were musicians – though her mother sang in the church choir – nor were they wealthy.
