When Lara St. John graduated from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 16, she hit the road, in search of travel and new musical experiences.
That quest led the young Canadian violinist to, of all places, what was then the Soviet Union, where she took up post-graduate study at the Moscow Conservatory.
“And I learned so much there, about songs, about Gypsy culture … it was an incredible year,” St. John said. “I’ve never had anything like it to this day.”
Following her instincts has proven to be a good bet for St. John, who built a major career for herself in the years since, traveling all over the world and releasing several well-received records, most of them on her own label, years before that became the standard operating procedure for today’s musicians.
Starting tonight in Key West and finishing Tuesday night in Delray Beach, St. John joins the South Florida Symphony Orchestra for four performances of the Violin Concerto (in D, Op. 35) of Tchaikovsky, on a program with the Fourth Symphony (in E-flat, Romantic) of Anton Bruckner. Conducting will be Sebrina Maria Alfonso, the orchestra’s music director.
A native of the Ontario city of London, St. John began playing the violin at age 2, first soloed with an orchestra at age 4, and made her symphonic debut in Europe at age 10 with the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Portugal. (Her older brother, Scott, is a violinist with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which comes to the Kravis on Nov. 24.) A tour through several European countries followed, and at age 13, she entered the Curtis Institute. Her first disc, released in 1996, of solo works by J.S. Bach, was briefly controversial for its cover, which showed an apparently unclothed St. John with a violin strategically placed over her chest.
But the disc sold well, and in 1999, St. John got ahead of the technological curve by forming her own record company, Ancalagon, a pet iguana named after a fierce dragon in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Silmarillion. She likes the suggestion that founding the company when she did makes her something of a pioneer, particularly for an age in which the DIY classical artist is paramount.
“Back then, it was a very strange thing to go out and do. And, in ’99, it was much more difficult,” St. John said. “All sorts of things have advanced in the past 13 years. To create something and get it out there is tons easier than it was in 1999, 2000.”
“The thing is, everybody now sort of does have their own label, so there’s kind of a glut in the market of people putting out their own stuff,” she said. “But I think in general it’s a positive thing, because if you’ve got something to say, you can get it out there.”
Being an entrepreneur seems to suit the 41-year-old violinist’s bubbly wonkiness, which is even expressed in the way her physical discs look when they come to market.
“I don’t shirk on the packaging. There’s still a lot of people out there that still have a tactile relationship to music,” she said. “They want to read a booklet, and they want to hold something in their hands, not get something on iTunes where you don’t know anything about it, and there’s no program notes or anything. I’m very conscientious about these things.”
A case in point is her disc of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, paired with the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires of Astor Piazzolla, released in 2008. Recorded in Venezuela with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra directed by Caracas native Eduardo Marturet (currently the director of the Miami Symphony Orchestra), the disc is a fiery, gritty exploration of both these works that could easily have been packaged in a simple plastic jewel box.
But St. John presents the disc in a recycled-paper triptych foldout with two lavishly illustrated booklets, one of them in English, the other in French, German and Spanish, featuring not just program notes but the full texts of the sonnets Vivaldi wrote to accompany his concerti.
Her attention to detail is also paramount in the editing process, for which she is always on hand.
“I tend to be very much into huge, long takes of things, no piecemeal editing. I always record at least two movements from beginning to end, not little bits,” she said. “Because for me, I would know if I started in the middle of a piece. It’s a different feeling. You don’t have the arc of the movement.”
On her first record, she already preferred this idea, playing the monumental Chaconne in D minor of Bach from start to finish. “You just feel differently if you take that 15-minute piece and start at minute number eight and just play for a minute. It’s just not the same thing, and me being able to know that is enough. I don’t care if nobody else in the world would be able to tell.
“In a way, I’m making these recordings for myself,” she said, laughing.
St. John is an avid seeker of new repertoire as well. Last month, she gave two concerts in Wisconsin featuring a new orchestration by British pianist-composer Martin Kennedy of the Violin Sonata of John Corigliano. Those concerts were directed by former Boca Symphonia conductor Alexander Platt, to whom St. John gives the credit for conceiving the idea of making the sonata into a concerto.
“I have something like 13 commissions out right now,” she said, including one for a chamber concerto by Australian composer Matthew Hindson, whose big-boned Violin Concerto was the featured work on a 2007 St. John release that included Corigliano’s Red Violin suite and the Listz Totentanz as arranged by Kennedy.
St. John will return to South Florida in March for two recitals, one March 10 at the University of Miami, and another March 27 at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre, with Kennedy at the piano. Those recitals will start with St. John’s “favorite first half,” the Violin Sonata of Cesar Franck, and Stomp, a piece Corigliano wrote for her. The second half contains two world premieres: Kennedy’s Song of the Moon, based on a Serbian folktune, and John Psathas’ Two Greek Songs. David Ludwig’s Five Ladino Songs and Matt Herskowitz’s Nagilara also are on the program with a Mike Atkinson arrangement of Ca La Breaza, a traditional Romanian song, and Kolo, a traditional Serbian dance.
All those pieces come out of a longstanding interest in Eastern European music as well as a large collection of folktunes gathered during St. John’s travels through the region.
“But I realized a couple years ago that I’ve got tens of thousands of these tunes in my collection,” she said, and started sending them out to composers she knows, each of whom chose two from the five to 10 St. John distributed. “It’s not arrangements as much as it’s original compositions based on the tunes.”
Her most recent recording, which came out earlier this year, brought her back to Bach, with a disc of the violin-and-keyboard sonatas transcribed for harp and violin. St. John is accompanied on the record (Bach Sonatas) by French harpist Marie-Pierre Langlamet of the Berlin Philharmonic. The result works beautifully, and adds a special color and fluidity to this timeless music.
Bach, indeed, holds a special place in her affections, and she says her ultimate desert island disc would be the composer’s Mass in B minor, which she prefers even to the St. Matthew Passion. And she offers her fellow violinists a handy rule of thumb to follow when playing one of his fugues on the instrument.
“Whenever I teach people ― which is rare, just in master classes ― it’s always about thinking horizontally, not vertically,” she said, meaning listening for the contrapuntal lines, rather than tune over harmonies. “And also, always know what key you’re in and why.
“And those two tricks are all you really need to know for playing a Bach fugue on the violin,” St. John said, making it sound as easy as ― well, founding your own record label, or lighting out for the territories after graduating from a prestigious music school in your teens.