The Hamilton Spectator, July 5, 1997 'Jailbait' St. John bows into town by Hugh Fraser It isn't always bad when a mother comes unstrung over a couple of underfoot tots. In fact, it turned into a virtue for a couple of virtuosos. "My mum was just getting a little fed up with us," recalls Lara St. John. "And this Suzuki thing (a workshop introducing the Suzuki method of teaching very young children music) came through town and she thought: 'This might be something they can do.'" "So, she took my brother, Scott, to it and he comes back with this miniature violin. According to mother I just screamed and stomped until I got one too. Even though we might have been a bit young, I couldn't be shut up, because I wanted to do that fun thing too." "I was called a bedraggled nymphet by someone whom must have had a hard life with his name - I believe he was called Lloyd Dick," she chuckles. "Well, it seemed fun at the time," she adds with a tinge of world-weariness in her voice. At the time she was two, her brother Scott was three and the town was London, Ontario. Is it still fun now that she's in her 20's, a resident of New York, made her European debut at age 10, had her first CD catapult her into the Billboard best-seller classical charts and herself onto the pages of People Magazine? Added to which she also comes to Hamilton, July 15 to play Beethoven's violin concerto for the Boris Brott Summer Music Festival at the duMaurier Centre. "From time to time it is still fun," she grins. It was the picture on her CD cover that got her into People Magazine. The music is unaccompanied Bach, so she appeared on the cover, to the naked eye and fevered imagination, wearing nothing but her fiddle. What caused the sensation was she looked about 10 years younger than she was in 1996, when Clio Award-winning film director, Felix Limardo, took the shot. August periodicals rumbled with volcano-like disapproval. One radio station returned the disc unopened and demanded to be removed from the record label's mailing list. "Bare Bach: Unclad violinist ... has critics coming unstrung," howled People Magazine. "Selling 'jailbait' Bach," snorted U.S. News and World Report. The words "kiddie porn" were flung around like confetti. "California and New York didn't blink an eye. Most of the furor came from Canada," St. John says and at first she thought it was those conservative northerners and roared with laughter at the various epithets hurled her way. "I was called a bedraggled nymphet by someone whom must have had a hard life with his name - I believe he was called Lloyd Dick," she chuckles. But as the controversy mounted, St. John began to take it seriously and now thinks the country's horror at the Bernardo trial probably caused the raw, intolerant feelings. Luckily, the serious critics, who got past or didn't even notice the cover picture, just raved about the music. "Bach's and St. John's passion," noted one critic of the spell-binding performances and these reviews gave St. John the courage to fight back at the fuss over the linking of Bach's contrapuntal abstractions with passion and sensuality. "What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion and understated erotica, that popular music, even with all its energy and life, cannot begin to touch?" she fired back at one newspaper after being savaged in an editorial. And it is this message of the power and sensuality of classical music that St. John would like to bring to her own generation of unbelievers. First of all, she thinks, you cannot be ignorant about your own feelings, which means "no one is ignorant about music - they just may not have heard this particular piece before." Second, "it is very easy to reach [young listeners], even with something like Bach, as long as the person who is performing the music is doing it with everything they've got." St. John discovered this by doing "in-stores" - promotional tours playing in record retail outlets - the musical equivalent of the author's book tour. "They are free and a lot of young people go, as not many of them have $25 to spend on a concert ticket," and in-stores are not hung about with "classical music elitism". It wasn't university professors who made the soundtrack of the film Amadeus go platinum, she adds, but the depiction of Mozart as an ordinary, sex-driven guy and his music - which just happens to be the music of the world's most transcendent musical genius ever. Up until the year-of-the-album-cover, St. John had been just your run-of-the-mill child prodigy. Which must have seemed the most natural thing in the world to her, as she followed her child-prodigy brother around the world concertizing in lock step. At five and six respectively they made their concert debut with the Windsor Symphony. Lara was Grand National Winner in the Canadian Musical Competitions at nine, made her European debut at ten, which led to solo engagements in England, France, Hungary, Peru, Portugal, Russia, the United States and Yugoslavia and she followed her brother to The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 13. She was 17 when she graduated. "Musically Curis is great and it is a terrific school," St. John admits. But I don't think it is a great place to grow up." It is small, concentrated, and totally residential. "Only about 30 new people come in any given year," she says. The education there, though the best in the world, is completely free. You are either selected from the world's best to be taught by the world's greatest, or you're not. If you falter for an instant, you're history. It's that stark and that simple. "So at 17, when all the others were selecting Juilliard, Mannes and Manhattan (in other words New York, New York) to do postgraduate work, I thought, well, let's go see something and picked Moscow." When you graduate from Curtis, you call them and they wait with bated breath for the call, they don't call you. "It was the best thing I ever did," she says now, even though this was before the wall came down and it was still very much the USSR. "I didn't speak any Russian, but you learn really fast when you have to," she laughs, crediting her French-speaking dad with her facility with languages. Musically the year was a bust. The teacher she had selected defected to the west soon after she arrived "and there was so much red tape there was no one else I could study with. I wasn't interested anyway, as there was so much else to do. So basically I took a year off." On returning to New York still just a teenager, she "got lucky in some competitions," she says. She aced the Philadelphia Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra competitions and won the Concours Nerini in Paris plus the Sylvia Gelber in Canada. She also placed second in the enormously prestigious D'Angelo and Olga Koussevitsky competitions in the United States. She now plays some 40 to 50 solo engagements a year and it keeps growing. Her next CD is finished and will be released this fall. It's called Gypsy and it is almost impossible to sit through it in one session it is so intense, according to early reports. "With the Bach, intensity is inherent in the music itself. To play it without intensity would be criminal. Gypsy is much more fun with many gypsy music standards and lots of music written especially for this album." True to her mission, she had an audience in the studio with her. "Every take was a performance and that heightens the intensity," she says. So, soon we'll have another stemwinder to get het up about from that "bedraggled nymphet" eh? Mr. Dick. Let's hope this time we'll just close our eyes and listen.