Toronto Star article, November 5, 1998 Violinist Lara St. John trying to bring Bach and friends to a younger crowd by Peter Goddard, ©Toronto Star Lara St. John is thinking Elvis. That's Elvis as in Presley, The Pelvis, the King - not the skater or the quarterback. Okay, so she's a classical violinist with a worldwide reputation and a 1702 Stradivarius called the "Lyall," after a Mrs. Lyall, an earlier owner. On loan to her from the Canada Council's Musical Instrument Bank, it's golden-brown, has soothing lines of superb sculpture and is worth $1 million-plus. It'll be on display at the Ford Centre tonight, as will her performances of Bach, Debussy, Prokofiev, Schubert and Bizet-Waxman. She's only 27 and not exactly of Elvis' generation. She was still booting stuffed baby bunnies out of her crib in her London, Ont., home when The King was booting ex-child bride Priscilla out of Graceland. But St. John is not exactly a babe in the woods when it comes to understanding that for her music to survive it must connect with a younger audience. And she remains unapologetic about posing topless for the cover of her debut CD, Bach Works for Solo Violin, two years back. Her pouty pose, which included holding a fiddle in front of her breasts, led to a headline in U.S. News & World Report about "selling 'jaibait' Bach." Rival fiddler Anne-Sophie Mutter had only shown some cleavage. St. John was going bare. Still more attitude is at work with the cover of her second CD, Gypsy, where there's a flash of cleavage. But it's closer to Shania Twain than Lolita. The Bach cover - intending to show that there was nothing between the artist and her music - made her look 16, even though she was 25 when it was shot. But phtographs do that to her. They pick up something of the kid that's still in her eyes and the ways she expresses herself with her hands. This doesn't make her the Valley Girl of Vivaldi, exactly. She's an old soul in a way, used to a life being alone during endless hours in hotel rooms and in planes. She averages some 40 concerts a year, reading the books she didn't as a kid. But even if the playing on Bach was praised sky-high, this it of classical-a go-go upset some record retailers. Tower Records in Seattle wouldn't stock the CD for months. St. John also knows her music history. She remembers hearing how Presley would find out what would connect with his audience. "He'd gyrate a bit and the audience would clap. He'd think, 'Oooooh that works,'" she says. "He'd do something else." "When you've done something several times, you have an experimental freedom with it. Then you can think 'How would it be if I did it this way?' It may just e a different tempo or something. But you can feel the audience react." "I think it was (pianist Arthur) Ruinstein who said one concert is worth a thousand hours of practice. He's right. But I've always been very happy to perform. Always." Good thing, too, because she can barely remember when she hasn't been performing. Her family wasn't particularly musical, she remembers. Her father, Ken - he died eight years ago - coached basketball. Mother Sharie played the piano. Yet from the start, Lara and her older brother, Scott, displayed prodigious talents. At 4, she soloed with the Windsor Symphony. At 9, she won the Canadian Music Competition. At 10, she'd made her European debut with the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon. At 14, she and Scott were studying at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. By then, she'd quit high school to study only music and the violin. But why not? Two minutes with her and you know just how no-nonsense she can be. It was impossible to combine high school courses with the long hours and high-level work Curtis demanded - not to mention finding a few hours a night for a waitressing job to bring in some cash. Something had to go, and school was it. By 17, after graduating from Curtis, she went to Moscow for further studies. But early on she realized she didn't like her teacher at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. So she put the fiddle on the shelf, picked up whatever jobs she could and had the best year of her life. By then, she knew she could return to music. She knew she could play at the highest level. She knew she had the right equipment: the broad palms, strong fingers and shoulders and a certain fearlessness about being on stage. Like brother Scott - who headed Millennium Chamer Music Society - she was born with a photographic memory. It was marginally impaired when she rode her bike into a wall during a sabbatical year her father took with the family in France. The tip of a scar that traverses her skull front-to-back is barely visible just above her right eyebrow. But her ability to learn and remember scores is still prodigious. And in the few weeks following tonight's concert, she aims to begin work on two violin concerti. "I've had moments when I started thinking about things going wrong on stage," she says over a glass of Chianti. "Buti it's kind of like (worrying about losing) the Strad. If you obsess about that, you're dead. "Considering I've been playing the violin since I was 3, playing is a natural thing. I get off on it. It's a kind of a high. It can't be a very good life for any musician when (playing) isn't a high. It's a rush. That's what makes it." What doesn't make it are international competitions, the launching pad for most careers. Being eliminated in the sem-final rounds of the 1995 Montreal International Music Competition may have further honed her uncharitable thoughts about competitions, where, she says, it's those who don't project much personality who get the prizes. Her unorthodoxy doesn't stop there. She understands the example set by British violinist Kennedy, who took a five-year hiatus away from the concert stage. "Nigel - I know I am not supposed to say that," she says, "I know he's just Kennedy now, but he is such a Nigel. Anyway, Nigel did it. And he did it very well." She's not sure if she could take such a break, though, not at this stage of her career. After a month or two out on the road, she can't wait to get back to her flat in New York City's Upper West Side, near the American Museum of Natural History. But after hanging out with her friends, "mostly musicians, some in jazz, some rock," she gets itchy to get back out on the road again. "Being a musician is not that far from being an athlete," she says. "There are a lot of physical things to think about. And if you do take time off, you can loose a little bit of the physical part." "I'm not going to get a whole lot better technically than I already am. But - and this is where music differs form athletics - who cares about technique in the end? "It's only a means to making music. If you don't have it, that sucks. If you do, and you don't have any (musicality) going, that sucks just as much." "Musically, there are always things you discover with Beethoven or Bach, say. And that only comes with you doing it later and later."