Sun-Sentinel, January 28, 2001 Fiddling around with sex By Lawrence A. Johnson - ©Sun-Sentinel It's the beginning of a new year (and, for nitpickers, a new millennium). The Florida Philharmonic appears to be back on track. The Florida Grand Opera is opening its first-ever production of a Czech opera, and the next two months promise to be the most active and dizzyingly varied on the South Florida music scene this year.    So let's talk about a naked all-girl string quartet.    It's not often that a classical chamber group makes waves in the general media. If you haven't yet heard about bond, with its self-consciously hip, lower-case mono-name, you likely will in the next few months. The four musicians -- violinists Haylie Ecker and Eos, violist Tania Davis and cellist Gay-Yee Westerhoff -- are in their mid-20s, with model-caliber looks. They all possess respectable musical pedigrees, with schooling from major conservatories such as London's Guildhall.    A massive media buzz was created in England in October with the release of the group's debut album, Born, scheduled to hit U.S. stores next month. What is all the fuss about? Most obviously, it's bond's sexy rock-inspired attire. Decca and the group's management are marketing bond as a kind of Spice Girls With Violins, a string quartet with attitude, four Vanessa Maes for the price of one (in the dubious tradition of the soft-core/jailbait sales pitch used for the pubescent fiddler). In British magazine articles and the promotional music video shot for their album -- filmed on location in Havana's Old City -- the group's members are clad in bikini halters, sarongs and cropped tops.    But what gained the greatest notoriety was not bond's clothes but the lack of them. A photograph taken of all four players nude has been widely circulated on the Internet. According to initial reports, the quartet had planned to use it for the cover of their debut album but Decca demurred. Now the record company claims that bond never intended to use this photo at all and says they are shocked -- shocked! -- that it "accidentally" got out via the Internet.    It doesn't take much skepticism to assume that the resulting publicity was no accident, and was, in fact, exactly what the musicians and their record company were hoping for. (Repeated requests for an interview with members of bond were rejected by Decca.)    But how's the music?     Adopting a let's-shake-up-the-establishment style is old hat in the classical business, as the punk raiment and offbeat demeanors of violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Nigel Kennedy have proven.    The difference is that both Nadja and Nigel are first-rate musicians tackling traditional and populist repertoire with great individuality. What is distressing to many observers is that at a time of massive retrenchment and corporate consolidation in the classical recording business, a respected label like Decca is throwing considerable marketing weight behind a pop-oriented venture whose classical connection is tenuous at best.    "I have to say that the first time I heard it I burst out laughing," said Norman Lebrecht, music critic of London's Daily Telegraph. "It is marketed as a classical recording but it's nothing of the sort. It's amplified violins, it's the sort of stuff you normally hear as backing for pop records except this time there is no act in front of it. It is the act."    The English author and critic has long predicted the imminent demise of classical music in such books as The Maestro Myth, Who Killed Classical Music? and his latest tome, Covent Garden: The Untold Story. With Decca putting its classical reputation behind a venture of this kind, Lebrecht sees even more confirmation that the end is nigh.    "The recording industry as a 20th century industry, like coal mining and the making of typewriters, is finished," said Lebrecht. "It's over. The classical side of it is particularly over, but there are still a few stragglers who don't know it yet.    "The only way they can justify their existence to the corporate megaliths that own them is by firstly, producing the (sales) numbers that the megaliths want to see; and, secondly, producing images that are familiar to the rock and multimedia forces that control this industry. And so they have to have bimbos and starlets, and they have to have them in the nude, and they have to have them playing the sort of stuff that comes at you off of middle-of-the-road radio."    Is image everything?    Using sex to sell a product is hardly news, not even in classical music. Nor is it limited to young women -- labels and agencies have capitalized on Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky's brooding features or violinist Joshua Bell's all-American good looks.    But even some of those who had few hesitations about making the most of their physical assets to entice record buyers are put off by groups such as bond, where the emphasis is on image and mass appeal rather than making a strong case for genuine classical music.    "What I really hate is using that kind of marketing to sell stuff that's crap," said Lara St. John.     The Canadian violinist disconcerted many in the industry five years ago when she appeared on the cover of her debut Bach recording wearing only her strategically placed instrument. The ensuing brouhaha proved to be a double-edged sword for St. John, who was 22 at the time.     "In Vancouver they called me 'a bedraggled nymphette,'" said St. John, 27, speaking from her home in New York. "I was completely not expecting the hubbub that followed. The Globe & Mail said I looked 10, possibly 12, that it was pedophilia, something like that. I mean it just got so ridiculous."    St. John said that the decision to run the photo was hers alone and was not influenced by marketing considerations. "In my entire life, I've considered boredom as something worse than death. I just kind of felt. 'Well, here I am, it's my first album. I've got control over what I'm going to do and I'd like to do something unusual.' I just thought it sort of expressed what was in the disc, which was just a person and a violin and nothing else."    The Eroica Trio -- which will appear next Sunday at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach -- has also benefited from a glamorous stage presence and image. While shying away from specific criticism of bond, not having heard the album, the group's pianist, Erika Nickrenz, is clearly uneasy with some of the marketing excess.     "People will determine their own limits and boundaries," she said. "I mean for the bond quartet, if being nude on their album cover is their true boundary, that's their risk and their record company's risk. But they're going to risk turning off a lot of people, and they'll probably interest a lot of people as well."    "With our group, we've never done anything we didn't want to do. We have complete control over our own image; through our contract for Angel/EMI we have approval first over all photos that are used. We were sure to get that because it really can get out of hand. We didn't want anything to get promoted out there that's not representative of what we are as women and musicians."    Nickrenz says the trio's bright colors and eye-catching gowns -- mostly by Carmen Marc Valvo -- are clearly meant to add visual flair, but it's nothing that will overpower the music.     "Some of it's more on the rock and roll side, but much of it is more evening wear, very elegant and glamorous," she said. "I don't think there's anything outrageous about what we wear. We like to wear more colors because we think it looks beautiful. It helps to think of a concert as like an opera. People are wonderful to look at because they're wearing interesting things onstage. I think that can be part of performance of classical music as well."    'That's their right'    Lebrecht regards the bond women as complicit in their corporate exploitation, although he also believes Decca's promotional efforts will victimize everyone involved in the long run.     "The bond musicians made a conscious, perhaps cynical decision that this is the way they were going to go and this is the way they were going to make money and project themselves," said Lebrecht. "And if that involved taking their clothes off, and doing for a label that used to be classical, then so be it. That's their right.    But, he points out, the record industry has always relied for much of its profits on backlists, and was able to generate new recordings through backlist income. As for bond's Born and its ilk, he says, "Well, of course these things have no backlist value whatsoever. They have no value beyond next Tuesday. Nobody will ever bother to revive them, except possibly some cynic in the 21st century might make a comedy routine out of it."     The musicians take a more holistic and nuanced view of packaging their assets to get the public into the tent.    St. John sees it as her mission to dispel the notion that classical music is for old rich folks. "For a new generation that doesn't grow up with Bach or Beethoven, how are we going to show them that this stuff is really cool? That's what I'd like to get across to younger people -- that pop is fine but it's got its five minutes and this music will be around forever because of its greatness. You don't get that across by putting yourself on a pedestal, standing there in black concert dress looking serious and bored.    "I mean, of course, I could have put a picture of a babbling brook on the front of my CD. But people like to have a visual connection. And if it's a chipmunk-cheeked 12-year-old look-alike, then so be it."    Those who bought St. John's CD for the cover photo -- or in spite of it -- were treated to some terrific Bach violin playing. And those who attend the Eroica Trio's concerts because of the glamorous gowns and attractive stage personas will hear some fine music-making as well. So too, in an era of cutbacks and ever-more competition in the classical music industry, long after bond has faded from view, those who put the music first will still be standing.    Both Nickrenz and Eroica violinist Adela Pena are pregnant right now, and Nickrenz looks forward to the surprised reaction they will get from audiences while on tour in the forthcoming months. "It will be interesting around April when people come to a concert expecting to see three really slender people," she says, laughing, "and these two whales will come waddling out."     "But I don't think anyone's going to walk out or ask for their money back. Not once we start playing."    Lawrence A. Johnson can be reached at ljohnson@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4708.