Lara St. John wants to give classical music more exposure. On her new CD, she uses nontraditional arrangements and instruments to rethink Bach.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published May 8, 2003
[Publicity photo]
Lara St. John is as famous for appearing nude, with a violin across her chest, on her first CD cover as she is for her playing. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she says. “My whole credo, so to speak, has always been to get this music out there.”
Many classical musicians have their own Web sites, but few are quite as entertaining as the one for Lara St. John.
It includes the violinist's list of best and worst airlines, her thoughts on the plight of Canadian orchestras and tips on how to get into concerts for free.
Would Midori, or Hilary Hahn, or Anne Akiko Meyers include a link to a fan's page hailing her as that "voluptuous vixen of violin virtuosity"? Not likely.
St. John, the soloist this weekend with the Florida Orchestra, is as famous for her topless CD cover photo as for her top-level playing of Bach, and it doesn't seem to bother her a bit.
"I don't think it's a bad thing," she said, speaking from her New York apartment. "My whole credo, so to speak, has always been to get this music out there. Sometimes publicity happens which doesn't necessarily talk about music; it's about record covers or photos. Obviously, I'd rather people talk about music, but at the same time, it's going to pique folks' interest who would never have been interested in classical music in the first place.
"I can't see U.S. News and World Report calling me up to ask my opinion about Bach chordal structures. It's going to be because of the controversy about the covers."
St. John, a native of London, Ontario, is an articulate analyst of music. Her Web site (www.larastjohn.com) includes essays on intonation and scales, and technical exercises for young musicians, but any interview with her is eventually going to get around to her 1996 debut album of Bach works for solo violin. With her hair down to her shoulders, she appeared nude on the cover except for the violin she held across her chest.
"It was just one of many photographs from the shoot," she said. "We were having fun at the end of the shoot, we were drinking tequila, and it just came out interestingly. I wanted to do something different, something innovative, and it was."
Sultry poses are nothing new for record covers, but what drew attention to St. John was how young she looked. Though she was 23 when the album was made, she didn't look a day over 13.
"To this day, even in a video I just made, I manage to look somewhere in my early teens," she said. "I think I never lost the baby fat off my cheeks. There's a certain angle that captures the chipmunk cheeks and makes me look really young.
"I suppose in many years, looking 10 years younger than you are will be an enviable position to be in. But for the moment, I'm just sick of being carded all the time."
St. John recently finished work on her first CD for Sony Classical, which will be her third recording of Bach and fourth overall. But it will be very different, perhaps even unrecognizable, from what Bach lovers are used to hearing.
"I've done a lot of completely traditional Bach," she said. "That's the bulk of what I've recorded up to now. I went into this with the mentality that we can't make it better because it's Bach. We certainly can make it worse, and we don't want to do that. So I think the whole idea was to make it different. What Bach wrote is so strong that I think it can have a lot of treatments done to it and still speak very powerfully."
Called Re-Bach - "Not exactly remix but redone, rethought," St. John said - the CD was produced by Magnus Fiennes (brother of actors Ralph and Joseph) who is known for his work with Bond, a British string quartet billed as the classical version of the Spice Girls.
St. John's album features nontraditional arrangements and instruments such as the tabla, electronic keyboards and electric bass.
"Even just choosing which Bach took hundreds of hours of listening," she said. "I probably heard about 150 cantatas in a couple of weeks. Most of the music is not well-known, like the recitative from Cantata 61. The original is only about 20 seconds long, and we've made it more than five minutes."
Other Bach on the album, to be released in June in Canada and later in the United States and Europe, will include a movement from the F-minor piano concerto, a Goldberg variation, a section of the Well-Tempered Clavier and a lute suite.
"Every track is different, but the violin is always the lead," St. John said, comparing some of the music to the Buddha Bar series of world-beat club music.
"Basically nobody's ever heard anything like it before, including myself."
This weekend, St. John will be the soloist in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2. She has played both Prokofiev violin concertos.
"They're really different," she said. "The first one is astonishingly beautiful, but it's less often played - because it doesn't end with a bang, I guess. So I've done the first less. And this one ends with a bang."
Also on the orchestra's all-Russian program, conducted by Jose Serebrier, are Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, Stravinsky's Firebird and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture.
St. John has never played in the Tampa Bay area, but her older brother, Scott, also a violinist, has given a number of recitals here. How did one family end up with two virtuoso violinists?
"We haven't got the foggiest idea," Lara said. "My parents are not musicians. My mother drove a semi for many years. My father was a language teacher and a basketball coach. So go figure."
Lara thinks that she and Scott are very different from each other. "His main love is chamber music. I don't really do very much of that. I tend to be more dramatic, more forceful in the ideas I want to get out there. He's got fantastic subtlety and sweetness to his playing. Sometimes I get the feeling from him that he knows so well that a whisper is stronger than a scream. Subtlety has never been my strong point, so when I hear it, I appreciate it."
Today there is a wealth of young female violin soloists, from Pamela Frank to Leila Josefowicz, Sarah Chang to Kyoko Takewaza. The violin sections of U.S. orchestras are about half women nowadays. St. John thinks there's a reason for all the female violinists.
"I have a theory that violin is seen as something that is okay for women because it kind of imitates the female voice," she said. "You really don't meet many female trombone players; in fact, I've never met one. Female tuba players; none. Female bass players are few and far between; I've met one. The violin seems to be the instrument that women gravitate to more. I think it's because it's the same register as the female voice.
"I myself have bass envy. I think it's because I've been squeaking up at the top of the register my whole life."
Lara St. John is as famous for appearing nude, with a violin across her chest, on her first CD cover as she is for her playing. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she says. “My whole credo, so to speak, has always been to get this music out there.”