Time Out New York, July 15-22, 1999 Sex and violins Absolutely scandalous Lara St. John bares all for her art By Susan Jackson Lara St. John, 27, is hardly your typical insulated prodigy-turned-conservatory musician. Sure, she first picked up a violin at age two, gave her debut public concert at four and graduated from the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with the equivalent of a college degree when she was 16. But how many young virtuosi give up their heavy-duty practicing schedule to explore the world? Or find work as a coat-check girl? And, of course, there's the naked album cover. St. John started playing after her four-year-old brother got a violin; she threw such a jealous fit that she was given one too. But after running the concert-circuit gauntlet and graduating from the conservatory, Lara decided to see if there were more to life than music. Instead of following her classmates to Juilliard or other prestigious graduate programs, she went to Moscow for a year and hung out with the locals. By the time she got back, she'd decided she really did want to devote her life to music and launched her career. We meet at an East Village cafe on a steamy afternoon between her rehearsals with Absolute Ensemble, with whom she'll solo on Friday 16 at Alice Tully Hall. St. John, who lives on the Upper West Side, talks like a Paganini presto movement - fast and full of unexpeced twists and turns, which she punctuates with waves of her cigarette. Her virtuoso playing is also frequently fast and furious - she plays Waxman's potentially hackneyed Carmen Fantasie at breakneck speed on her latest album, Gypsy, for instance. On the cover of Gypsy, St. John's long blond hair conceals her bare breast (the other one's covered by her leather jacket), but shocking as that is for a classical CD, it was her first album that created the real controversy: On Bach Works for Violin Solo, St. John stands behind Venetian blinds with only her strategically placed violin to cover her. Although St. John was 24 when the photo was taken, she looks about 10 years younger ("I do have this chipmunk-cheek thing when the light hits me in a certain way," she cheerfully admits). Tower Records at first refused to sell the album in its Seattle stores, and one scandalized reviewer sent it back to the publisher (Well-Tempered Productions in Berkeley) unopened. The rest of the public was intrigued, though; the CD sold phenomenally well for a classical release. Its success helped set St. John apart from all the other hip twentysomething violinists, especially since many of the reviewers who did open the packaging praised her razor-sharp technique. St. John rolls her eyes when the subject of the seminude cover comes up and insists she didn't plan for it to be shocking. She understands the fuss now, sort of, but she's still unrepentant: "It got uncontestably good works out there, and if that's not important, what is?" She still gets several e-mails a week about the album. Recently, she heard from a farmer in Idaho and a man in the Sudan who'd never paid attention to classical music before, but now want to hear more. Getting classical music out there is one of St. John's missions. "For a lot of years, this music has been seen as elitist - people think you need a Ph.D. to understand it," she says. It was to counteract that notion that St. John decided to perform with the Absolute Ensemble, a group of young musicians formed by Kristjan Jaervi whose repertoire includes Black Sabbath as well as Beethoven. "I like their mentality; it's funny but full of integrity. They know what they're doing, but they're not formal," she says. "Kristjan and I and quite a few people believe that people will get into classical music without dumbing it down or playing the 1812 Overture 70,000 times." She points out that her own recordings of Bartok's work, some of it extremely inaccessible, have been well received (there's an excellent Second Rhapsody on Gypsy). The secret? "As long as you're not on a pedestal with a 17-layer ball gown and Marie Antoinette hair," says St. John (who generally dresses in downtown black when she performs), "people react if you believe in what you're doing."