For Immediate Release

FRENCH IMPRESSIONS

CHAMBER MUSIC BY CHAUSSON & TAILLEFERRE TO BE RELEASED ON CEDILLE RECORDS, JULY 11

The album brings together violinist Rachel Barton Pine, pianist Orion Weiss, and the Pacifica Quartet for transformational works by Ernest Chausson and Germaine Tailleferre

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS (JUNE 2, 2025) — On July 11, 2025, Cedille Records releases French Impressions: Chamber Music by Chausson & Tailleferre, which unites violinist Rachel Barton Pine, pianist Orion Weiss, and the Pacifica Quartet for chamber works of various configurations by French composers of the turn-of-the-century and early-mid-20th century.

The album represents the culmination of a decades-long dream for Pine, who returns for her 25th Cedille album. From age 10 to 17, Pine studied violin with Anita and Roland Vamos, growing up alongside their son, cellist Brandon Vamos, and future daughter-in-law, violinist Simin Ganatra, who became founding members of the Pacifica Quartet. As a violinist who adores playing chamber music but isn’t a member of a string quartet, Pine holds special fondness for the Chausson Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet and had long hoped to play it with the Pacifica.

“It’s thrilling to have finally had the opportunity to collaborate on the Chausson with the Pacifica,” Pine writes in her introductory note to the album. “Our close friendship and shared musical roots made playing together feel natural, as we easily matched character ideas and tone colors.”

Weiss — whom Pine first met and worked with at a festival in Montreal nearly two decades ago — was another natural fit to join the cohort for the Chausson. “I was struck by his exceptional blend of technical mastery, artistic vision, and collaborative sensitivity,” writes Pine.

Amédée-Ernest Chausson wrote in a variety of genres, including opera, sacred music, symphonic poems, and songs, but his contemporaries held his chamber music in highest esteem; one of them remarked that his Concert was among the most important French chamber works of the late-19th century. Its unusual scoring allows the work to present the intimate sounds of a piano or violin sonata alongside the grand style of a violin concerto. Premiered in 1889, the Concert expanded the boundaries of what was possible in chamber music.

To complement the Chausson and round out the album, Pine’s manager, John Zion (who also manages the Pacifica Quartet and Weiss), suggested Germaine Tailleferre, a prolific composer active shortly after Chausson. A piano prodigy who enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at age 12, Tailleferre was the only female member of the composer collective Les Six, which also included Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc; she won more premiers prix (first prizes) for her compositions than any other member of the group.

Unlike Chausson, whose career was cut tragically short after dying in a bicycle accident at 44, Tailleferre lived to age 91 and participated in French musical life for over six decades. Her long career allowed her to explore many genres: numerous ballets and operas, and more than 30 film scores. Her chamber music ranges from solo pieces for piano or harp to small ensemble music for nearly every wind and string instrument configuration. This album features a cross-section of these works, written between 1913 and 1947, including her String Quartet, performed by Pacifica, and three works for violin and piano, played by Pine and Weiss: Violin Sonata No. 2, Pastorale, and Berceuse.



“Listening to her compositions, I was struck by their beautiful quality of sounding simultaneously very familiar, yet unexpected,” said Pine. “Each work we chose grabbed me immediately and continues to grow on me the more time I spend with it.”

ABOUT RACHEL BARTON PINE

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; 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. 

She has recorded over 40 acclaimed albums (more than 20 for Cedille Records), many of which have hit the top of the charts. Most recently, Cedille Records released Corelli: Violin Sonatas, Op. 5, a two-disc set featuring the 12 sonatas for violin and continuo; Dependent Arising, which reveals surprising confluences between classical and heavy metal music by pairing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Earl Maneein’s Dependent Arising; and Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries: 25th Anniversary Edition, which includes a new recording of Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Jonathon Heyward. Other top-charting albums include Pine’s Mozart: Complete Violin Concertos with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Sir Neville Marriner; Testament: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by Johann Sebastian Bach; Violin Lullabies; and Bel Canto Paganini: 24 Caprices and other works for solo violin. 

Pine has appeared on The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, PBS NewsHour, A Prairie Home Companion, NPR’s Tiny Desk, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Performance Today. 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.

Her RBP Foundation assists young artists through its Instrument Loan Program and Grants for Education and Career and, since 2001, has run the groundbreaking Music by Black Composers project. 

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

ABOUT PACIFICA QUARTET

With a career spanning nearly three decades, the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet has achieved international recognition as one of the finest chamber ensembles performing today. The Quartet is known for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style, and often-daring repertory choices. Having served as quartet-in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music for the past decade, the Quartet also leads the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies at the Aspen Music Festival and School, and was previously the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and University of Chicago. In 2021, the Pacifica Quartet received its second Grammy Award, for Cedille’s Contemporary Voices, an exploration of music by three Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002, the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and appointment to Lincoln Center’s The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) and, in 2006, was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. With its powerful energy and captivating, cohesive sound, Pacifica has established itself as the embodiment of the senior American quartet sound.

The members of the Pacifica Quartet live in Bloomington, IN, where they serve as quartet-in-residence and full-time faculty members at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Prior to that appointment, the Quartet was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana from 2003 to 2012, and also served as resident performing artist at the University of Chicago for 17 years.

ABOUT ORION WEISS

One of the most sought-after soloists and chamber music collaborators today, Orion Weiss is a “brilliant pianist” (New York Times) with “powerful technique and exceptional insight” (Washington Post). He has dazzled audiences worldwide with his “head-spinning range of colors” (Chicago Tribune) and has performed with the major orchestras of North America, including the Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, National, and American Symphonies; Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; and the Cleveland Orchestra.

In 2024 Weiss released Arc III, the final album in his critically-acclaimed Arc recital trilogy (First Hand Records). His live performances include engagements in London (Wigmore Hall), Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bergen (Norway), New York (Carnegie’s Zankel Hall), Washington DC (Kennedy Center), Seattle, and Bloomington (Indiana). He has featured in recitals at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Italy’s Teatro Marrucino Biglietteria, Washington University (St. Louis), LaMusica Chamber Music Festival (Sarasota, Florida), and on tour with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Known for his affinity for chamber music, Weiss has performed with such artists as violinists Augustin Hadelich, William Hagen, and James Ehnes; pianists Michael Brown and Shai Wosner; cellist Julie Albers; and the Ariel, Parker, and Pacifica Quartets.



A native of Ohio, Weiss attended the Cleveland Institute of Music and Juilliard. Weiss’s awards include the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year, a Gilmore Young Artist Award, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

ABOUT CEDILLE RECORDS

Launched in November 1989 by James Ginsburg, Grammy Award-winning Cedille Records (pronounced say-DEE) is dedicated to showcasing and promoting the most noteworthy classical artists in and from the Chicago area. A nonprofit record label, Cedille’s mission is to produce and disseminate audiophile recordings presenting the finest classical music performers and composers in and from Chicago. The recordings further the careers and legacies of these Chicago artists as Cedille invests in not only the recordings but in the artists represented on them. The label’s catalog of more than 200 front-line albums brims with attractive, off-the-beaten-path repertoire from the Baroque era to the present day, including world premieres of well over 400 classical compositions. Works from the classical canon, when they do appear, are usually heard in particularly imaginative pairings. Cedille never removes albums from its catalog and each recording is a permanent documentation of the artists’ work. With more than 180 Chicago artists and ensembles, over 80 making their professional recording debuts on the label, Cedille brings the area’s most significant classical music artists to a worldwide listening public. Cedille recordings are available on CD, as MP3 and hi-resolution FLAC downloads, and on all major streaming platforms. Learn more Cedille Records and explore the label’s catalog at cedillerecords.org.

French Impressions: Chamber Music by Chausson & Tailleferre

CEDILLE RECORDS — CDR 90000 238



Rachel Barton Pine, violin

Orion Weiss, piano

Pacifica Quartet

TRACK LISTING

ERNEST CHAUSSON

Concert for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet, Op. 21 (39:35)

I. I.  Décidé – Animé (14:41)

2. II. Sicilienne: Pas vite (4:05)

3. III. Grave (9:42)

4. IV. Finale: Très animé (10:53)

Rachel Barton Pine, Orion Weiss, Pacifica Quartet

GERMAINE TAILLEFERRE

Violin Sonata No. 2 (12:42)

5. I.  Allegro non troppo (3:58)

6. II. Adagietto (3:40)

7. III. Final: Allegro (4:54)

Rachel Barton Pine, Orion Weiss

TAILLEFERRE

8. Pastorale (3:22)

Rachel Barton Pine, Orion Weiss

TAILLEFERRE

String Quartet

9. I.  Modéré (2:41)

10. II. Intermède (2:36) 

11. III. Final: Vif (4:44)

Pacifica Quartet

TAILLEFERRE

12. Berceuse (2:20)

Rachel Barton Pine, Orion Weiss

Total Duration: 68:34

Produced and engineered by James Ginsburg and Bill Maylone. Recorded January 5 & 6, 2025 at Mary Patricia Gannon Concert Hall, DePaul University (Chicago, IL) and February 3, 2025 at Sasha and Eugene Jarvis Opera Hall, DePaul University (Chicago, IL).

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