At just 35, Rachel Barton Pine has played most of the major violin concertos with the world’s finest orchestras. She also belongs to a thrash-metal band.

Writing about Rachel Barton Pine isn’t hard, but it can be difficult knowing when to stop.

I mean, what do you leave out? Barton Pine’s hefty press kit weighs more than the 1742 Guarneri del Gesu violin that she plays, detailing as it does the many, many facets of her glittering career. For someone who’s only 35, she’s sure done a lot—beyond, that is, playing most of the major violin concertos with many of the world’s finest orchestras. There’s the early-music trio, and the thrash-metal band, and the cadenza collection she composed, and the charity work, and the tireless advocacy for forgotten female and African-American composers. Other possible angles to explore include her hardscrabble childhood and the near-fatal commuter-train accident in which she lost a leg. Too many stories to tell, at least for now.

Asked what she’d like to get across in this piece, however, Barton Pine says she wants to emphasize her eager adoption of various social-networking technologies, including YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter. Connecting with her fans, she says, is one of her greatest pleasures; to do so, start by going to www.rachelbartonpine.com/.

That taken care of, maybe it’s best to talk about the reason she’s coming to the Orpheum on Saturday and Monday (October 24 and 26): to play Camille Saint-Saí«ns’s Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Written in 1880 for the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate, it’s an orchestral standard. In order to give it her own distinctive spin, Barton Pine has gone way beyond merely studying the notes on the page.

“I think that in interpreting an instrumental work written for a particular instrumentalist of the past, it’s just as important to learn about the dedicatee as it is to learn about the composer,” she says, reached by phone at a Stockton, California, hotel. “In the case of Sarasate, I’ve gotten to know him particularly well because he was the subject of my very first recording, Homage to Sarasate, with [Itzhak] Perlman’s long-time pianist Samuel Sanders.

“Sarasate was Spanish and certainly had that Spanish fire, but he was trained at the Paris Conservatoire and was renowned for his elegance, his almost aristocratic approach to violin-playing,” she continues. “He was not one of these bombastic players, but very, very refined. And of course Saint-Saí«ns’s music also carries that wonderful French suavity, and I think that’s the right approach for this concerto. It should always be about beauty as the first goal.”

That’s typical Barton Pine: she’s erudite without being condescending, and she exudes a very particular blend of scholarship and passion. This she credits to the economically challenged but intellectually stimulating environment provided by her parents, who pulled her out of the regular school system at the age of eight.

“I started home schooling in the third grade, for really just very practical reasons—needing to have enough time to do all the practising that I wanted to do, because I was so passionate about the violin,” she explains. “As a home-schooler, you have the freedom in your academic studies to really pursue your own interests, and I think that type of educational mindset extended to my music-making as well—having the luxury of time and flexibility of schedule to really follow your interests and seek out new discoveries.”

A short list of those interests, she says, would include “unearthing unjustifiably neglected repertoire from the past, learning about historically informed period-instrument practices, learning about different types of folk and traditional music, working with living composers, and exploring all the masterpieces of the repertoire”.

And then there’s that aforementioned metal sextet, Earthen Grave.

“When I was a teenager, studying classical all day long, metal was sort of my escape,” the violinist says. “It was the type of popular music that I was most drawn to, because of its extreme intensity. It’s a funny word to use, but I thought it was something so far away from classical that I could relax to it at the end of the day and turn off the studying part of my brain.

“As it turns out, probably the reason I was drawn to metal is because it’s one of the closest of the popular genres to classical music.”

And it’s about to get closer: Barton Pine is developing a body of metal-inspired music for the classical violin. “I’m collaborating with composers, classical composers who also love metal, and having them write things for acoustic classical violin that incorporate metal somehow or other,” she says. “This is really the next frontier. It’s a project waiting to be done—and I’m just the violinist to do it.”