Pine, a 33-year-old Chicago-based solo violinist and chamber player, has recorded the D major concertos of Clement and Beethoven in tandem on a newly released CD, and their similarities are striking. In 1806, Clement conducted and performed the solo in Beethoven’s concerto, which the latter had written specifically for Clement. The two works bear out a contemporary description of Clement’s playing style: “indescribably delicate, neat, and elegant,” according to an 1805 Leipzig music journal. “It has an extremely delightful tenderness and cleanness that undoubtedly secures him a place among the most perfect violinists.”

Contrast this with the style of another violinist close to Beethoven, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a teacher of Beethoven’s who participated in premieres and early performances of almost all the composer’s string quartets, from Op. 59 on. Beethoven called Schuppanzigh’s playing “fiery and expressive,” although this may have come at the expense of playing in tune, especially in upper positions. Nevertheless, the violin writing in Beethoven’s quartets, tailored for Schuppanzigh, tends to be much more aggressive than what’s found in his concerto.

“The French concertos of that time, by Kreutzer and Rode and those guys, kept the violin front and center with the orchestra just a backup band,” Pine says. “Clement and Beethoven take a more collegial or even chamber-music approach. People talk about how unusual it was for Beethoven to do that, but Clement did it first.”

CLEMENT, A VIENNA-BORN PRODIGY, was giving concerts by age 7. In 1793, he participated in a concert-contest with Viotti, and the differences between the two must have been striking. Viotti was a powerful, outgoing stylist; Clement eschewed the newfangled Tourte bow and employed an older, and shorter, Italian bow, which lent itself to his emphasis on dexterity and nuance.

Clement wrote for his own use 26 concertinos and six full-length violin concertos, among other things, but many of the manuscripts have disappeared, and his D major concerto had remained unperformed and virtually unknown for nearly 200 years, until English musicologist Clive Brown prepared a modern critical edition, issued in 2005 by A-R Editions.

Brown detects a “hidden dialogue” between Clement and Beethoven being conducted in their D major concertos. They exemplify, he writes, “a specific type of Viennese concerto, with distinctive stylistic character, structure, and unusual expansiveness in the individual movements.”

Pine says: “There are particular passages in both concertos where they use the same pattern of notes. Clive Brown has a very amusing comment that one can’t be sure if Beethoven was paying homage to Clement by using these same figurations, or saying, ‘Here’s how to do it better.’ Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is superior to most others in existence, especially those written during his period, but Clement’s is worthy in its own right.”

Pine emphasizes the need for refinement and delicacy in the Clement concerto, so unlike much of the period’s other concerto repertory. “In the French concertos you see a lot of double-stop passages and a lot of virtuoso sections that are there just to be in your face and flamboyant,” she says. “There’s nothing like that in the Clement. It’s very serious-minded. The moments of virtuosity are integrated into the score. The point is not for the violinist to display his or her skills, but to go for the musical concept as a whole.

“Clement still has one foot firmly in the Classical period. The Kreutzer and Rode concertos have one foot already toward the Romantic period. Their use of tone colors and vibrato and rubato are slightly different. I think the Clement concerto benefits from less of the romanticized approach to bring out its full vibrancy. I approach it as a true Classical concerto.”

In recitals, Pine often plays neglected short concertos, like that of José White, with a piano reduction of the orchestral score, but she wouldn’t do that with Clement. It’s about 40 minutes long, and, Pine asserts, doesn’t lend itself to pruning. “It’s the kind of piece where you wouldn’t want to cut the tuttis, because it’s symphonically conceived,” she says. “The tuttis are part of the architecture, and the violin plays descant over the melodies played by the orchestra. It’s so much about color, not one of these 19th-century concertos in which the violin has all the good stuff and it doesn’t matter who’s backing it up.

“In the Clement concerto, you’re listening to the orchestra in a symphonic way, and the violin is riding on top of that.”

“He didn’t treat the Beethoven concerto with disdain after all, and that story about being a circus violinist is really just an urban legend,” Pine says with relief. Still, the story had left her with a lingering suspicion that Clement’s own music might be as superficial as that stunt. Only when a music shopkeeper pressed the new edition of the concerto upon her did she realize that Clement was a composer of substance, and the vital “missing link” to the development of Beethoven’s concerto.

Still, she hasn’t been able to explore Clement’s other music because of its general unavailability in modern editions. And although she has recorded the D major concerto, she has yet to play it in public, so she’s not sure what special challenges it might offer in live performance. She supposes that it would be a lot like performing the Beethoven concerto, which, she says, “doesn’t have the muscular kind of playing that you find in the Brahms and Joachim concertos. But it takes extreme concentration to get from the beginning to end with one stream of thought that carries you with a single thread all the way through to make cohesive sense of it. I assume that would be the case with the Clement. But to what degree they compare, I can’t speculate. When you first perform a piece in concert, there are all kinds of surprises in store that you can’t expect from the practice room.”

Clement did not leave cadenzas for his concerto. Brown provided them in his edition, but Pine, as is her custom, went to the trouble of writing her own, which she used in her recording. (Carl Fischer will publish Pine’s collected cadenzas and virtuoso solos this winter.) It’s another example of how seriously Pine has come to take the music of a violinist-composer who fell into obscurity even before his death.

“His style of playing came to be considered old fashioned,” she says. “The kind of playing people wanted to listen to changed, and he didn’t change with them, so he fell out of favor as an artist. You can almost compare it to rock music these days. Some older bands have a following of older fans, but you don’t have people playing in certain older styles, like a disco band from the ’70s.

“Classical music used to be about what’s being written today. But now, we play classical music from through all the centuries, and it doesn’t really matter whether it was fashionable or not 200 years ago. We don’t have those kinds of prejudices anymore. What people thought then is less important than the staying power the music turns out to have. History is the best judge. We’re in a better position now to look back and have a broader, more accurate view of what really is good.”

And how good does Pine believe the Clement concerto to be? “Let’s put it this way: Nothing else written at the time of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is as good as Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,” she says. “But the Clement is as good as the best of everything else that wasn’t as good as the Beethoven.”