Violin superstar Rachel Barton Pine is in the headlinesbecause a pilot refused to let her carry on her Guarneri -but that precious instrument is only the most famous of her fiddles. Rachel is also a master of its Baroque and Renaissance predecessors, and she brought one to Ames for a concert of Italian Baroque music with her Trio Settecento. You can hear the result on this week's University Concert. They played Veracini, Locatelli, Geminiani, and an honorary Italian named Handel (known during his stay in Rome as "my dear Saxon"). Karen Impola hosts and produces this broadcast as part of IPR's University Concert series.
This is not the first time Rachel has changed flight plans to keep the Guarneri out of the luggage compartment, where it'd almost certainly be wrecked. (The instrument, worth tens of millions of dollars, is on loan to her.) Last year, she and her family slept a night on an airport floorinstead of taking a chance on check-in. By the way, Barton Pine used the Guarneri on a recent recording of the Mozart concertos with Sir Neville Marriner; she talked about that set with Barney Sherman here.
