Playful Pursuits

Canadian Conductor Tania Miller has distinguished herself as a dynamic interpreter, musician and innovator. On the podium, Maestra Miller projects authority, dynamism and sheer love of the experience of making music. As one critic put it, she delivers calm intensity . . . expressive, colourful and full of life . . . her experience and charisma are audible.” Others call her performances “technically immaculate, vivid and stirring”. 

Tania Miller has recently been named as Artistic Director of the Brott Music Festival in Canada.  She is the Artistic Director and Conductor of the National Academy Orchestra of Canada and of Brott Opera. Maestra Miller’s 23-24 season includes her debut with Vancouver Opera in the production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, a concert with highly acclaimed soprano, Sondra Radvanovsky and Vancouver’s Opera West, and debuts with the Baton Rouge Symphony, Illinois Symphony, with return engagements to the Springfield Symphony, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, and London Symphonia, among others. Miller served as interim Principal Conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic in the 22-23 season, and recently made her debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic, I Musici de Montreal, and the New Haven Symphony. 

Miller has conducted the KBS Symphony in Seoul, and the Virtuoso Chamber Orchestra at the World Orchestra Festival in Daegu, South Korea with concerts in Daegu, Hwaseong, and Seoul. She has appeared as a guest conductor in Canada, the United States and Europe with such orchestras as the Bern Symphony Orchestra, NFM Wroclåw Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestra Métropolitain de Montreal, Vancouver Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec, Naples Philharmonic, Hartford Symphony, Madison Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Winnipeg Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic and numerous others. Maestro Miller was Music Director of Canada’s Victoria Symphony for 14 years, and was named Music Director Emerita for her commitment to the orchestra and community.  She has distinguished herself as a visionary leader and innovator with a deep commitment to contemporary repertoire and composers and has gained a national reputation as a highly effective advocate and communicator for the arts. 

Miller conducted Calgary Opera’s 2022 production of Lehar’s Merry Widow and numerous opera productions as Artistic Director of Michigan Opera Works and guest conductor of Opera McGill in Montreal. She was Assistant Conductor of the Carmel Bach Festival for four seasons, and Assistant and Associate Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony from 2000-2004. She was Assistant Conductor of the Banff Summer Festival of the Arts opera production of Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O. 

Ms. Miller has a Doctorate and Masters degree in Conducting from the University of Michigan.  Maestro Miller received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Royal Roads University, and an Honorary Fellowship Diploma from Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music for her commitment to leadership in community and music education. She was recipient of the 2017 Friends of Canadian Music award from the Canadian League of Composers for her dedication to the performance of contemporary music. 

The acclaimed American concert violinist Rachel Barton Pine thrills international audiences with her dazzling technique, lustrous tone, and emotional honesty. With an infectious joy in music-making and a passion for connecting historical research to performance, Pine transforms audiences’ experiences of classical music. She is a leading interpreter of the great classical masterworks and of important contemporary music. 

Pine performs with the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, and the Chicago, Vienna, and Detroit symphony orchestras. She has worked with renowned conductors that include Teddy Abrams, Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Semyon Bychkov, Neeme Järvi, Christoph Eschenbach, Erich Leinsdorf, Nicholas McGegan, Zubin Mehta, Tito Muñoz, and John Nelson. As a chamber musician, Pine has performed with Jonathan Gilad, Clive Greensmith, Paul Neubauer, Jory Vinikour, William Warfield, Orion Weiss, and the Pacifica and Parker quartets. 

Highlights of Pine’s 2024–25 season include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiere of José White’s Violin Concerto in F-sharp Minor with conductor Jonathan Rush; a tour of Israel with the Tel Aviv Soloists Ensemble, performing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto; Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra; the world premiere of Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis’ Violin Concerto with the Winnipeg Symphony and conductor Daniel Raiskin; Billy Childs’ Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Rhode Island Philharmonic and conductor Radu Paponiu; and the French premiere of Earl Maneein’s violin concerto Dependent Arising with the Orchestre National de Bretagne and conductor Nicolas Ellis. Over the season, Pine will also perform concertos by Brahms and Sibelius, and music by Wynton Marsalis, Jessie Montgomery, and Mark O’Connor, among other living composers. As a chamber musician, Pine will appear in recitals in Chicago, Phoenix, Kalamazoo, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, and Tel Aviv. 

In September 2024, Cedille Records releases Pine’s new album, Corelli Violin Sonatas, Op. 5, a two-disc set with the 12 sonatas for violin and continuo that constitute the Baroque composer’s opus 5. Pine performs on violin and viola d’amore, holding the violin against her chest, which history suggests is the way Corelli performed (rather than holding it on the collarbone, the way today’s baroque violinists usually do). The different performance style resulted in subtle changes in tempos and timing because of the slightly different use of the left hand and of the bow arm. The approach led to a different tone compared to that of Pine’s 2007 recording of the third sonata with Trio Settecento, featuring John Mark Rozendaal and David Schrader, who join Pine again in the new recording. Rozendaal plays violoncello and viola da gamba and Schrader plays positive organ and harpsichord. Brandon Acker joins the trio on archlute, theorbo, and guitar. Pine improvised all her ornaments, using a historically informed approach. 

Dependent Arising, Pine’s previous album on Cedille (2023), revealed surprising confluences between classical and heavy metal music by pairing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Earl Maneein’s Dependent Arising, written for Pine and performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor Tito Muñoz. Pine’s recording of Malek Jandali’s Violin Concerto No. 2, performed with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, was also released in 2023 on Cedille. The previous year, the label released Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries: 25th Anniversary Edition, featuring Pine’s new recording of Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Jonathon Heyward, and reprisals of her 1997 recordings of masterworks by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1775), José White (1864), and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1899). 

In the 2023-24 season, Pine joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Stéphane Denève at the Hollywood Bowl for a performance of Billy Childs’ Violin Concerto No. 2, written specially for her. She also performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Mercury Chamber Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, National Symphony of Uruguay, and Minas Gerais Philharmonic. In recital, Pine appeared at the Kennedy Center, Ravinia Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Música de Guadalajara. Her early-music appearances included a performance with the Syracuse Orchestra and her daughter, Sylvia Pine; San Francisco Early Music Society with harpsichordist Jory Vinikour; and in Virginia with Trio Settecento. 

Pine’s discography consists of over 40 recordings, including Blues Dialogues, with a program of blues-influenced classical works by 20th- and 21st-century Black composers (Matthew Hagle on piano); Dvořák and Khachaturian Violin Concertos (Teddy Abrams and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra); Brahms and Joachim Violin Concertos (Carlos Kalmar and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), and Elgar and Bruch Violin Concertos (Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra). Pine and Sir Neville Marriner’s Mozart: Complete Violin Concertos, with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and her Bel Canto Paganini both charted at #3 on the classical charts. Testament: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, and Violin Lullabies both debuted at #1. 

Pine frequently performs music by contemporary composers, including major works written for her by Billy Childs, Mohammed Fairouz, Marcus Goddard, Earl Maneein, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Daniel Bernard Roumain, José Serebrier, and Augusta Read Thomas. In addition to her career as a soloist, she is an avid performer of baroque, renaissance, and medieval music on baroque violin, viola d’amore, renaissance violin, and rebec. 

Pine has also substituted for fellow soloists on short notice for a number of concerts. Most notably, in 2021, with just 3.5 hours’ notice, she performed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, replacing Midori, to critical acclaim. 

The violinist has appeared on The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, PBS NewsHour, Prairie Home Companion, NPR’s Tiny Desk and All Things Considered, and Performance Today. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She holds prizes from several of the world’s leading competitions, including a gold medal at the 1992 J.S. Bach International Violin Competition. 

Pine writes her own cadenzas and performs many of her own arrangements. With the publication of The Rachel Barton Pine Collection, she became the only living artist and first woman in Carl Fischer’s Masters Collection series. During the pandemic, she performed the entire solo violin part of 24 different violin concertos, live and unaccompanied, for her weekly series “24 in 24: Concertos from the Inside.” 

An active philanthropist, Pine has led the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation for over two decades. Early in her career, she noticed that young people learning classical music seldom have the opportunity to study and perform music written by Black composers. Since 2001, Pine and her Foundation’s Music by Black Composers project have collected more than 900 works by over 450 Black composers from the 18th–21st centuries. Music by Black Composers curates free repertoire directories on its website and publishes print resources. In 2024 the project released Violin Volumes 2 and 3 for elementary-level students, the second installment in a series of pedagogical books of music exclusively by Black composers. The Rachel Barton Pine Foundation also assists young artists through its Instrument Loan Program and Grants for Education and Career. Pine has also served on the board of many non-profits, including the Sphinx Organization. 

She performs on the “ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat” Joseph Guarnerius “del Gesù” (Cremona 1742), on lifetime loan from her anonymous patron.