Five reasons to hear Lara St. John perform with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra May 8

On May 8 Lara St. John will perform with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra at the Indiana History Center. Says the blurb:

The finale of the ICO’s Sterling Season – Celebrating 25 Years – will feature Lara St. John, the Canadian-born violinist who has been described as “a phenomenon” by The Strad and a “high-powered soloist” by the New York Times. She joins the ICO to perform selections from Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Ms. St. John appeared with the ICO in its 2000-2001 season, and, fittingly, returns to close the ICO’s Sterling Season – Celebrating 25 Years.

Ms St. John is quite popular. By coincidence, as I write this WICR is playing her performance of Ravel's "Tzigane" at Wolftrap. Tzigane or Cygan is the slightly derisive term for Roma (Gypsies) in Eastern Europe. Bill McLaughlin just informed me she was sent to Hungary to play and study as a pre-teenager, which accounts for "the Gypsy in her soul." OK. Regardless of how she shaped her soul, her late 1990s album "Gypsy" is very good.

In the years to follow, she has continued developing Roma-influenced music -- perhaps more accurately, music influenced by non-Roma composers' ideas of what Gypsy music sounds like. Here's a bit of her performing with Ilan Rechtman, his "Variations on Dark Eyes" (Occhi Chornye) from "Gypsy."






As you see, she has quite a presence. You might recognize this performance from the 2008 Olympics, from Nastia Luikin's gold medal winning floor exercise.



So why should you make the time to go to the Indiana History Center to hear Lara St. John? Five reasons come to mind.

1. We can never get enough Astor Piazzolla.

One of St. John's most recent recordings is a pairing of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and Astor Piazzolla's "Four Seasons."

Piazzolla is great, a favorite of Provocate. You surely know Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," but probably not Piazzolla's. The Argentinian tango-master doesn't intend his music as an homage or variation on the Red Priest's ... when listening to the pieces of the similar name, remember that the four seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are opposite of teh four seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. It's an excellent performance. On her website Ms St. John helpfully provides a bunch of excellent reviews ... but I haven't seen a poor review. She performs with the hot young conductor, Eduardo Marturet, and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.If her record seems familiar, you may be thinking of the same two pieces paired on "The Eight Seasons" by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica.

Good for St. John, if you are going to swipe an idea, swipe it from the best. I like hers better. Depending on your technological skills and attitude about copyright laws, you can download her "Four Seasons" at the great music blog, Music is the Key. Otherwise, the good people at Amazon would be happy to sell you a copy.

2. Lara St. John has survived the double-edged career trauma of hottie-ness. 
As you may gather from her album covers above, Ms St. John has not been afraid to let the world know that she is an attractive young woman. The willingness to put herself on display stirred controversy with the cover of her debut album, "Bach Works for Solo Violin."

"Nothing comes between me and my music" was her rationale, echoing what Brooke Shield said about her "Calvins" a couple decades before. The album was one of the best selling of the 1990s, although the cover probably contributed to sales only indirectly, by signaling that this was not a conservative or conventional performer of Back. (Ironically, her Bach on this album was played more conservatively than on later albums when Ms St,. John posed wearing more than a Guadagnini violin.) Even before the internet fully took off, there were cheaper ways to obtain less grainy pictures of scantily clad young women than buying a CD. The risk she took as a provocatively posing 24 year old was that her music wouldn't sustain her career over the long run. Lucky for her and for us, she is good enough, imaginative and creative enough, to hold our attention as she approaches 40 and wear buttoned blouses.

3. She has consistently pushed the classical music to the edges of new technologies. 
Lara St. John led the way with the use of her website and iTunes to sell her music. she also lent her music to the path-breaking web-based video series, lonelygirl15, which is said to have had 110 million hits.



4. She has managed to preserve fidelity to the original music while drawing on new sources for creative inspiration. 
All this mishing and mashing of popular culture, East European influences, and more could go astray if she were twisting and distorting Bach for the sake of appealing to pop culture. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with reinterpreting the classics in light of contemporary tastes ... that has been going on for centuries. The first Lara St. John album I listened to carefully, "re:Bach," left me cold.



Listening again, within the context of her project for reinterpreting and preserving, it makes more sense. So just enjoy her video "Goldberg 2" without worrying about its lack of connections to Bach's Goldberg Variations. It's a cool use of images, language, music.






5. Apolkalypse Now!
Lara St. John's latest project is my favorite. Polkastra, with its new album "Apolkalypse Now":

Here we see all the aspects of her curiosity and desire to integrate and reinterpret old sources in order to create something entirely new. It's more than a jokey poking at polkas, a musical style was probably seemed outdated when the first accordian started the farmers stomping. This video shows an amazing tribute to the Romanian and Hungarian cembalon players of Central Europe two or three incarnations in the past.






This interview with violin.com about the inspiration behind Polkastra shows Ms St. John flashing her intellect and wit.

Good for ICO to bring Lara St. John back to Indy to perform Vivaldi and Piazzolla. But I hope it will be possible for us to talk with her, to explore some of the ideas of cross-genre musical creativity that is bubbling in Indy right now.