In fact it’s as well to begin with this virtuoso fiddler. Like its companion piece Emigrantes Celtas was written the year after Ysaye’s solo sonatas, so it’s been cannily chosen for reasons both of chronology and content. It’s a melancholy fantasy whereas Terra!! Á Nosa!! Is a vibrant folklotic drama complete with bagpipe drone imitations. Incidentally Quiroga did record some of his own compositions but never the solo works. He was a bewitching colourist and his genre pieces reflect his vivid sense of drama. Barton Pine has arranged Albéniz’s Asturias cleverly fusing the piano and guitar arrangements. But she’s certainly not averse to broadening the repertoire substantially, which she does when tackling Roque Cordero’s Rapsodia Panameña. This work is an uneasy accommodation of Panamanian ease and abrasive twelve-tone writing, a bridge never wholly successfully realised to my mind, though others may well disagree. The Balada Española is better known as the music from the film Jeux interdits and from Narciso Yepes’s guitar recording. It survives the translation to violin, with all the associated transformative difficulties of melodic projection rather well.

César Espejo wrote his Prélude Ibérique in 1958 for Henryk Szeryng. It’s a busy, virtuosic affair, quite showy in places, and Barton Pine responds with some intense vibrato. Another technically difficult piece is that of Luis Jorge González whose Epitalamio Tanguero was written in 2004 for the soloist and her husband. We also have the old world charm of José White, whose Etude No.6 is a dancing affair, and that guitar standby, Recuerdos de la Alhambra which Ruggiero Ricci has arranged, and very adeptly, for violin. Serebrier’s Aires de Tango is another piece dedicated to Barton Pine and its melancholy romanticism comes buttressed by fast bowing demands. Piazzolla’s Tango was arranged by the soloist and it opens with uncharacteristic ‘machine gun’ attacca. The difference in acoustic between the reciter, Héctor Elizondo, and Barton Pine is not beneficial to Ferdinand the Bull, a witty and imaginative tale, well told, and finely performed. Barton Pine is in the Levon Chilingirian class in this performance.

For those who fancy the concentrated pleasures of a Latin or Latin-inspired solo violin outing, this imaginatively selected programme has been excelmore....

Review By Nick Barnard ,MusicWeb International,October 2011

Certain performers you just trust. It goes beyond being a fan or even liking how they perform. This is a case of knowing if it’s good enough for X or Y it’s good enough for me. Rachel Barton Pine is my trusted performer par excellence. Her technique is a given, her musicianship amongst the very best, but what I really like and admire about Barton-Pine is the questing curiosity of her programming. And it really is her programming—no contractual obligation discs here or compilations planned by others, she pursues her own passions and interests and in doing so produces discs of exemplary quality. In this pursuit of excellence she is helped in no small way by her main record company—Cedille. This seems to be an ideally symbiotic relationship—Barton-Pine is their best-selling artist—but they back her up with a product that oozes class from the superb production and engineering to the tasteful artwork and extended fascinating liner-notes.

With a preamble like that I am delighted to be able to report that this new disc is every bit as good as, if not better than, those that have come before. Better possibly because Barton-Pine tackles the potentially thorny, aurally fatiguing repertoire of the solo violin. As is so often the case there is a vast gulf between the actual quantity of music written for solo violin and that which actually gets recorded. Go beyond Bach, Paganini and Ysaye—with some Bartók and/or Prokofiev thrown in—and most collectors will be scratching around for many other works in their collections. Yet this represents the tiniest tip of an imposing iceberg. In her characteristically personal yet informative note Barton-Pine points the reader towards Harry Edlund’s Music for Solo Violin Unaccompanied. This lists some 2,500 pieces of which Edlund had a library of over 1000. Barton-Pine has inherited this library and it is impossible to imagine this remarkable resource in safer or better hands. The idea for this disc sprang from her investigation of this library and the realisation that there was the potential for an album with a Spanish/Latin-American theme. If this album contains some 14 tracks, and there are 1000 pieces in the library—I reckon we must be good for another fifty or so discs worth!

Barton-Pine’s programming genius—and I do mean genius—is her ability to combine the relatively familiar with the less known and the never-knew-existed. Perhaps its just me but this kind of disc has me gurgling with delight. Of the 14 items no less than 8 are world premiere recordings and even the best known piece—Ysaye’s Sonata No.6 (a Manuel Quiroga) takes on a whole new character when placed in context with original Quiroga compositions. Quite bravely—or so it seemed before listening—the disc opens with Barton-Pine’s own transcription of Albéniz’s Asturias. Elbio Barilari in his extended but consistently fascinating liner-note considers this “thmore....

Review By Guy Rickards ,Gramophone,October 2011

An absorbing programme of Iberiana played with skill on a single fiddle

This is Rachel Barton Pine’s 12th CD recording for Çedille…weighty piece (the longest single item is José Serebrier’s Aires de Tango, written specially for her, at a touch over eight minutes), it does contain a wealth of engaging music superbly delivered. There are familiar items, albeit in less-well-known guises, such as Albéniz’s Asturias in a finger-blistering transcription by Pine herself (which almost convinces that this is how Albéniz may have first “heard” the music) or Tarrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra in a fine arrangement by Ruggiero Ricci.