Fashion Toronto, April 2001 Classical Beauties Four of classical music's brightest - and most photogenic - young stars hail from Canada. But is it their talent that's attracting all the attention? By Andrew Borkowski, photographed by Jim Allen There's no mistaking the six-foot amazon with the waist-length, honey-blonde tresses as she strides into the Bloor Street cafe where we've agreed to meet. From the dreadlocked bike couriers at the bar to the grizzled Hungarian chess players at the back table, all eyes are on her the minute she walks through the door. She points at me. Then she points to a vacant table on the patio. It's not a request. Supermodel? Movie star? No. Musician. And a seasoned one at that. This woman found herself at the centre of a media circus after posing topless and holding her instrument across her breasts on the cover of her debut CD. (She says the intention was to make a statement about the intimate relationship between the artist and the music.) In the furor that followed, Tower Records instructed her label not send him any more CDs. Some reviewers wrote scathing denunciations of her. She remembers a Vancouver review with rueful glee. "That dude called me a bedraggled nymphet. I got a lot of mileage out of that one." But all the negative attention prompted other reviewers to listen to the CD, generating an avalanche of raves. Lara St. John is not a rock star; she's a classical violinist, part of a new generation of performers, including pianist Berenika Zakrzewski and violinists Leila Josefowicz and Catherine Manoukian, taking a page from Madonna's book to put the music they believe in over the top. Internationally, orchestras and record labels are stirring up all the hoopla they can around a new generation of glamorous young soloists, particularly young women like 14-year-old Welsh soprano Charlotte Church and 20-year-old American violinist Hilary Hahn. But some observers proclaim that talent is taking a back seat to sex appeal. British violinist Vanessa Mae (who wears nothing but short skirts and tall leather boots on the web sites devoted to her) and Swedish bowmaster Linda Brava (who has posed nude for Playboy) get mentioned as artists whose physical features have more to do with their fame than their musical gifts. Is the same true of our four superstars? As St. John pulls on an iced latte and American cigarettes, she talks frankly about some of her recent marketing experiences. Apart from going topless on the 1997 Bach: Works for Violin Solo, the London, Ont., native posed with an iguana on her head for People magazine. Gear magazine presented St. John as the embodiment of "exchange-student chic" in a spread on classical babes that also featured Germany's Anne-Sophie Mutte as the "dominatrix-on-day-off" type. Innocent of the magazine's not-quite-soft-core niche, St. John sent her mother down to buy a copy at the local newsstand. "My mom held up this nearly naked Brazilian woman on the cover and said, 'Are you sure, dear?" [...] While it's tempting to suggest that there's a new zeitgeist around classical music, the urge to proclaim a renaissance in its popularity hits a snag the minute you look at classical's miniscule share of record sales: The very best that can be said is that they're stagnant. The Canadian Recording Industry Association says it doesn't track sales figures by musical category, but conventional wisdom says that classical music accounts for about five per cent of all sales in Canada and has held steady at that level for the past decade. That may be optimistic. The Recording Industry Association of America does keep figures by category and reports that classical music accounted for 3.5 per cent of music sales in 1999 after bottoming out at 2.9 per cent in 1995. That's after classical music sales reached an all-time U.S. high of five per cent in the '80s. Lorenz Ehrsam heads the Instrumental Division of New York's Dispeker Management which represents Lara St. John. "The record companies are slimming like crazy," he says, adding that the recordings that do come out are governed more by the market-driven sensibilities of executives who demand the same level of return on recordings by 80-piece orchestras as they're accustomed to getting on CDs by rock groups and pop soloists. "I think the record companies are turning to anything they can think of," says Bramwell Tovey, music director of the Vancouver Symphony. "If they can sell millions and millions of records of Britney Spears bleating her way to the top of the hit parade complete with whatever provocative outfit has been chosen for her that day, then we can see where the attempts to emulate that with young women in classical music come from." The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has been accused of putting marketing ahead of music and padding its season with an inordinate number of attractive young soloists. Saraste refutes the suggestion. He says that showcasing young talent has always been a part of the orchestra's mandate and that he personally auditions most of the new talent to get the purely musical information he needs to make a decision. Tovey, who first performed alongside Josefowicz when she was 13, concurs: Sex appeal is the last thing on his mind when sizing up new talent. "When you stand next to a musician on stage and see how hot and sweaty they get..." he says. "There's nothing particularly attractive or marketable about musicians in various states of undress." "I think they represent unique personal qualities" Saraste says of the four girls, "and I got interested in their playing because of those qualities." Specifically he mentions St. John's skill at manipulating repertoire to create "a new kind of concert experience." Although she has learned that a little notoriety doesn't hurt when it comes to marketing, St. John isn't about to make a habit of showing some skin whenever the opportunity arises. In concert, her taste for eveningwear with a medieval look is as far out as she cares to get. "If I have a certain image," she says, "it's because that's just the way I am, and subtlety in any area of life has never been my strong point." It has been called the Babe-ification of classical music, but anyone who thinks there's a bimbo factor at work in the careers of these women ought to listen to St. John plot her assault on the international recording establishment. With the aid of a private backer she's taken the unheard-of step of putting together her own CD with a full orchestra, which will be released [this summer]. She has her own web site, larastjohn.com, and also acts as an advisor to eclassicalmusic.com, an e-commerce venture that will eventually put new classical recordings on-line and eliminate the need for stores and the labels whom she codemns as "leeches." And anyone thinking these babes aren't here to stay ought to check out what Josefowicz has to say about the boys' clubs still to be conquered in the European classical music establishment. "When you talk about the Vienna Philharmonic," she says, "yes, there's a boys' club. They hired one woman to play the harp. That's just bullshit, and you can quote me." Andrew Borkowski is a writer and a member of the jazz/blues band The Grayceful Daddies.