Rock Fans Are Filling Halls for Orchestras. Iana Dubinina Explains Why the Violin Leads

A first-prize winner in Paris and Salzburg, who toured 26 nearly sold-out concerts as concertmaster, reveals how a frontman's voice becomes a string line and how one player holds an ensemble together without a baton.

Orchestras playing rock have outgrown the novelty slot: this month classical musicians covering Linkin Park and System of a Down are on a nine-arena tour of the UK and Ireland, with a stop at Wembley’s OVO Arena on October 25. Such shows ask an orchestra to do a rock band’s job, and someone has to stand in for the singer and lead guitarist.

In the orchestras Iana Dubinina played with, that role often fell to her violin. A Boston-based violinist, she was concertmaster and lead soloist of the touring rock orchestras RockestraLive and Hard Rock Orchestra, playing Linkin Park, Imagine Dragons, and Queen and other band-by-band programs in a 6,000-seat state concert hall and frequently leading the musicians with no conductor on the podium. Her own explanation of why the violin ends up in front starts, fittingly, with a rock song.

Iana grew up in a family with no musicians, and she was seven when she first heard the opening of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On.” “I heard the strings come in and felt goosebumps run all over my body,” she recalls. That same day she told her parents she would be a violinist, and she never changed course.

The training that followed prepared her for the front of the stage: in Paris she earned honors in solo performance at the Schola Cantorum and again, four years later, at the Académie Internationale d’Art Musical, a specialty that, she says, taught her to carry the melody and take responsibility for where the music goes rather than blend into a section. Juries took notice. She won first prize at Les Clés d’Or in Paris, whose founder later seated her on the jury beside musicians from the Orchestre de Paris and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and the top prize at Salzburg’s Grand Prize Virtuoso came with a laureates’ concert at the Mozarteum. A chief conductor nine time zones from Paris invited her to solo with his symphony orchestra.

On classical stages, she has said, she always lacked room to express herself fully, and concerts came with nerves she talked down with a private rule: “If someone doesn’t like my playing, let them come out and play it better than me.” In rock, she says, the fear is gone. “Playing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 is one thing,” she explains. “‘Sonne’ is something else.” She also co-founded the crossover project NEOorchestra, whose first paid concert sold out in advance.

On a rock stage, the violin earns its place at the front by singing. In her shows, it often took the vocalist’s part. “The violin is as close to the human voice as it gets,” Iana says. For Muse, she studied the slides and glissandos Matthew Bellamy uses to reach his notes, listening “again and again to copy it.”Guitar solos asked for the same care. “It wasn’t enough to reproduce the notes,” she says. “The violin had to keep the force and character of the original music.”

On stage, the first chair also took over from the podium. In Hard Rock Orchestra and the film-score orchestra Sonorus, Iana often did the conductor’s job, setting the tempo and cueing the sections with her bow and body while playing the big solos herself. In those years, Hard Rock Orchestra outgrew its club nights, sometimes two in a day, and moved into venues of a thousand seats and more.

Promoters put the violinist on the posters, and her face went up on street banners in city after city. Hard Rock Orchestra played in red and black; Klavier, a five-piece project built around her violin to play Rammstein’s hits, wore costumes the musicians designed themselves. The themed nights drew fans, band by band. “Metallica fans come to Metallica,” she notes. On the 26-date Sonorus tour, which ran five weeks and sold out almost every night, some listeners traveled from other cities just to hear her. Some stretches held two or three shows back to back. “After giving everything on stage, the exhaustion came with satisfaction,” she says.

The bands whose songs she played noticed too. When Hard Rock Orchestra played System of a Down’s “Genocidal Humanoidz,” bassist Shavo Odadjian shared the performance and pointed his followers to the violinist wearing a red bow, Iana, on the far left. Newspapers and a classical-music journal have since interviewed her, and she belongs to two unions of musicians and artists. Classical colleagues, she recalls, admit to being a little jealous of the freedom and drive rock musicians have.

From Boston, Iana plans to perform across the United States as a lead violinist and soloist and to record violin parts for film, advertising, games and fashion. The centerpiece is a new group of her own that will play rock and contemporary music on classical instruments, with the solo violin out in front, the way the strings open the Queen song she heard at seven.