I was lucky enough to see Rachel Barton Pine last year when she was a soloist during a Dupage Symphony Orchestra. Disclosure: my wife, Sarah, plays violin in the DSO. The piece she played with the orchestra was great, but it was her encore that blew me away, as well as most of the audience who was there.

Since DSO was spending the season celebrating their 50th Anniversary Rachel’s encore was “Happy Birthday” played in about 100 different styles. Super fast, slow, a duet with herself, plucking, and many other tricks, some of which I didn’t even know a violin could do. Sarah was upset she was sitting with the orchestra being Rachel as she couldn’t see her hands as they worked the musical magick.

For the past number of years she’s been combining her talent with the violin with her love for metal and using that to expose more people to classical music.

From the article: Young violinist on quest to spread classical music

During her rehabilitation following the 1995 accident, she played her own virtuosic arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at two Chicago Bulls playoff games and at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1996.

“People started coming up to me on the streets saying, ‘Wow, I heard your national anthem and I never realized that violins were so cool,'” she said. “That really inspired me, by the fact that it’s not that people don’t like violin music but maybe that they just haven’t given it a chance, been properly exposed to it.”

So off she went to visit rock radio stations, bringing her fiddle and her vast knowledge of Megadeth and Mozart, Metallica and Mendelssohn, Robert Plant and Johann Pachelbel.

Anyway, thanks to Chicagoist who pointed out the MSNBC story to me and two of the rock cover tracks, I’ve now ordered Stringendo Storming The Citadel off Rachel’s web site. Luckily my wife doesn’t typically read my blog, so I should be able to suprise her with it.