Lara St. John on Empowerment and the Making of “Dear Lara”
This Link takes you to the Podcast, Video and Show notes of this episode. Below is the transcript of my 2025 interview with Lara St. John:
Lara St. John:
I want it to be possible for 19 year olds to say, "Hey, this happened" without it ruining their career anymore. But they can't because of the preposterous amount of power, because of the fact that these men will then say, "oh, don't work with her" , and they'll be blacklisted, and we have to stop that because what it is, it's a massive brain drain. And there are so many women who have been abused out of the music world and who have just left the music world because it was ruined for them by this abuse. And some of those could have been, I mean, can you imagine the amount of talent that's just gone by the wayside? Half of the people that wrote to me are not in the profession anymore. Half of those don't even listen to music anymore. Like any kind of music, the whole thing, what they loved, what they thought they were going to give their lives to was ruined by the greed of one man.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests.I knew parts of this conversation would be difficult because violinist Lara St. John is a survivor of a horrible case of sexual abuse and assault at one of the most famous music schools. I’ve been following her story since the first article came out in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I wanted to release an episode with her close to the release of her film “Dear Lara”. She’ll be announcing the world premiere of this powerful documentary in early 2026, which I was able view before this conversation that we recorded earlier this year in October. Please note that there are detailed timestamps, so you can go to specific parts of this wide-ranging interview, especially since there are mentions of both sexual assault and a suicide attempt. However, Lara is so much more than a survivor, activist, and film maker. She’s known internationally as a phenomenal violin soloist and her creativity, warmth, humour and brilliance come through in this interview during which we talked about many things: her decision to become the first classical soloist to start her own record label, her formative year in the former USSR, advice about learning music and the violin, and a tribute to one of her main mentors, Joey Corpus. In fact Joey’s amazing story wasn’t one I was familiar with and since this conversation I’ve learned more about this inspiring pedagogue. We talked about two of her many albums, and you’ll hear a couple of clips from Shiksa and She/Her/Hers; track names are in the timestamps and everything is linked to Lara’s website in the show notes. Lara is also known for her love for iguanas, and at the very beginning of this episode you’ll get to meet Baby Octavius.Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links.
Lara St. John:
There he is. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, Lara.
Lara St. John:
Isn't he cute? This is Baby Octavius. So he wanted to say hello.
Leah Roseman:
For those people listening to the podcast, I'll encourage them to check out the show notes. We'll definitely have a photo of him and they'll see this on socials. So can you tell us a little bit about him?
Lara St. John:
Yeah, he's actually a Caribbean iguana, so it's different from the ones you see in Florida and stuff. He's actually critically endangered, so there's four breeders in the States and we're trying to bring them back. And yeah, he's almost three years old. He came to me at three weeks when he was the size of a cricket. So basically I've known him forever since he was a tiny little baby. And as you can see, he loves cuddles and pats, and if I kiss his head, he closes his eyes.
Leah Roseman:
He's essentially a miniature dinosaur.
Lara St. John:
He is, but he's vegan. He's only scary to raspberries, and he loves nasturtiums, for example. We just found that out. But his main thing is collard greens, dandelions and green things.
Leah Roseman:
I saw that reel you posted recently with him eating nasturtiums.
Lara St. John:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And you improvised a little bit on top of that.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, it's a little bit hard to get the sync right on a munching iguana, but I did my best.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks for bringing him out.
Lara St. John:
Yep. He's going to go back and have some, yeah, he kind of lives over there in my office, and we have quite the little menagerie, actually. There's a little squirrel, urban squirrel that comes by pretty much every day and some doves and a cardinal these days. So pretty good for Manhattan, I'd say.
Leah Roseman:
So Lara, among your many honors, you were appointed to the order of Canada a few years ago, and I understand it comes with some special perks sometimes.
Lara St. John:
Well, yeah. I mean, this year I got invited to this kind of, I actually couldn't believe it when I saw the guest list. I was like, this can't be for real. They're just naming people who are on the Order of Canada. But these folks actually are coming to Canadian Thanksgiving and it's like Mike Myers and Michael J. Fox and Ryan Reynolds and Vincent Garber, and it's hosted by Paul Schafer. And I'm just like, what is going on here? And a couple of other folks, and I think it's just kind of, oh, well, I'll find out, and I'm sure I will selfie the hell out of myself and be the annoying fan girl that I truly am for some of these folks. But yeah, it's kind of exciting. So I guess it was just, oh, also Graydon Carter, when I saw that it was Graydon Carter, I realized it's probably the Consul sort of saying, alright guys, we need to, let's band together and figure out what to do kind of thing. Because known Graydon Carter's been, well, I mean famously for decades kind of very anti the present regime.
Leah Roseman:
It's been your home for a very long time. New York.
Lara St. John:
It has, and I mean, at least once a month, I'm back in Canada or once every two months at the very least all the time every year, except for in COVID. But yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Actually speaking of coming back to Canada, there's quite a beautiful story. Recently you brought a special violin to Toronto.
Lara St. John:
Oh, Moishe!
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Lara St. John:
Yeah. It was a little while ago. It was actually through the Azrieli Foundation. They had me do the premiere of one of the people who won the Azrieli prize. Oh gosh, I think it was back in 2018 or 2019 just before COVID. And so we did the premiere in Montreal, and then we went over to Warsaw and Prague to do the same concert there. And I wandered into this antique store actually with Sharon Azrieli, and we were sort of looking around. She said, oh, look, there's a violin. And it turned out that there was a star of David on the back in bronze and black enamel. And I thought, wow, this is quite something. And I asked the guy, where's it from? And he was super grouchy. It was just like, you expect me to know where everything's from. I mean, it was like a ridiculous antique store, like thousands and hundreds of thousands of stuff.
And then we wandered into a back place, sort of a back room, really, and it had Nazi memorabilia, the real stuff. And I was quite disturbed by that because in Germany, of course, that's completely illegal, and apparently in Poland it's not, and people can make money by selling it. And I was really disturbed by that. So I thought, well, I got to get Moishe out of there. So I bought him and he didn't even come with a case, so I had to take him on the plane like a baby or something, until Prague and one of the nice people in Prague offered me an old violin case, so at least I could carry him home in a case. But so he lived in New York for a while, and I thought, well, the person I live with in Toronto when I'm there, she has a wonderful house and is so generous. And her brother-in-law has a klezmer band. And the other time I was there, they said, oh, we'll borrow a violin so you can play some tunes. And I thought that's really where Moishe deserves to live, not just one of seven or eight violins I have here living under a piano, occasionally playing in my klezmer band. He should be the house fiddle for the Gladstone family. So Moishe now lives in Toronto, and I think he's happy.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Lara St. John:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you're friends with Alicia Svigals, right?
Lara St. John:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I take Klessens from her.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Lara St. John:
I call them Klessens or I used to, I haven't for a little while. But yeah, she basically taught me the ins and outs of Klezmer playing and stuff. And I mean, unless somebody actually tells you, you don't really realize that there's actually no vibrato. It's all trills, it's all krechs, it's all this and that. And once you sort of figure that out, suddenly you start sounding more like the clarinets of your and stuff like that. It's a very interesting how even more than what we do, it really is just a imitation of a voice.
Leah Roseman:
So she's one of several klezmer musicians I've had on. She was one of my earlier interviews.
Lara St. John:
Oh, really? Oh, cool. She's great.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It might be interesting to talk a little bit now about your album Shiksa with Matt.
Lara St. John:
Oh, sure.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's such a beautiful album. I've really enjoyed listening to it. Could we include a clip or a track from that?
Lara St. John:
Sure,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah?
Lara St. John:
Whatever you like.
Leah Roseman:
One of my favorites is actually "The Pain Will Find Us".
Lara St. John:
Oh, the Greek one.
Leah Roseman:
Is it Greek? Okay.
Lara St. John:
It is Greek, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's nice. It is sort of a Greek Roma Greek actually. So really interesting stuff. There's a cool composer from New Zealand, actually, John Psafas, he's Greek New Zealander, I'm not quite sure how to say that. New Zealand, Greeker, or, well, anyway, and I met him some time ago and asked him to set a couple of Greek tunes, so that was the one that really stood out. (clip from The Pain Will Find Us from album Shiksa)
Leah Roseman:
So that project's from about 10 years ago?
Lara St. John:
Yes, I would say, yeah, about 2015. My whole life I've been really interested in stuff from, I mean, it's such a big region that I can't even, like sort of folk music, Roma music, Jewish music, central European, Balkan, Greek from the Levant, that whole big area basically. And since kind of childhood actually, so I lived in the USSR for a while and learned a lot of more stuff at that point. Went down to Armenia and learned about Armenian tunes and basically just been collecting them my whole life. And then I thought, well, why don't I bring some of my favorite ones to basically the concert stage, like the recital stage, which I play on and give them a new life. So I had them arranged, or I did a couple myself and just started doing them live.
Leah Roseman:
And you're known for also your arrangements and transcriptions and improv. So when you started to play this kind of music, did that kind of open that up for you?
Lara St. John:
Yeah, I mean, some of it, a lot of it, because I asked composers for the Shiksa album, at least I asked composers, so a lot of it was written out. But for example, in the "Ah Ya Zayn" and some of Matt's stuff, there's a bunch of open solos there that happened. Yeah, I mean, as you go further east, actually, then there's more room for open solos rather than further west. For example, you'll hear the difference in even just Serbian to Bulgarian Roma music. Bulgarian has way more open solos and Serbian tends to be verse chorus, verse chorus. So interesting how it changes, even though it's the same kind of origin, it changes from space to space in that relatively small area.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Okay. Well maybe we'll dig in a little bit more about your time in the U.S.S.R. a little bit later to put it in context.
So I think we need to talk about your upcoming film, "Dear Lara", which you've been working on for several years.
Lara St. John:
Yeah. The impetus began, I guess to give a little background, which I probably should. I became public in 2019. I worked on that article for about eight months with the Philadelphia Inquirer, became public about what happened to me when I was 14 years old at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, to make a very long and sad story short, under threat of expulsion because it's a full scholarship school for not just me, but also my brother who was there and studying with the same major teacher, Jascha Brodsky. I was abused and finally raped by this man at 14 when he was 78. So obviously that's a troublesome thing for anyone of any age. And eventually I got two friends that I was able to speak to a little bit. I didn't tell them the full story, but enough for them to be like, what? We have to get you out of that situation. And so the three of us went to the dean and he actually just scoffed and said, what do you want me to do about it? And my guy friend said, well, she has to change teachers.
And the dean said, well, we don't do that at Curtis. That does not happen. And I was basically a big fountain. And finally, I guess they probably realized they had a bit of a problem on their hands. And the wife of the then director, Naomi Graffman, took me out for ice cream and said, oh, isn't this great? We've managed to switch your teacher, and of course there's no need to tell anyone else about this. And I said, yeah, I didn't want to tell anyone else about it. I just wanted to get out of that situation. I was so glad I wasn't getting punished actually in one way or another, expelled or something. I mean, it was a very hard time. But eventually they never did anything to the pedophile rapist. He was allowed to just continue teaching. And he taught until he died. And I actually couldn't. It was really hard for me to just be in the same building and sometimes see him. So I graduated the minute I could and left. I had just turned 17 years old and I left a full scholarship school where my brother also lived because of what was done to me.
Leah Roseman:
And you certainly didn't feel you could have gone to the police at that point.
Lara St. John:
Well, the dean actually said at one point, who do you think the police would believe? Some kid or somebody who's been with this school for decades. And I had the feeling he was right. And they knew at that time that the statute of limitations in Pennsylvania was two years. So I would've had to get myself as a broken, traumatized kid, expensive lawyers, and go against, I would've been raked over the coals. So there was absolutely nothing I could do, and they knew it. And so they shoved it under the carpet. I left the institution and nothing was ever done, even though it bubbled up pretty much every decade. And I would once again tell somebody you should do something.
And they never did. So finally in 2019, I told the entire story to the Philadelphia Inquirer. They found a bunch of other people to whom it had happened with the same teacher, not quite as egregious as mine, but various things happened and the story came out and I thought, okay, well that's kind of something right? To have the worst thing that ever happened to you. Suddenly thousands, hundreds of thousands of people basically know in a very disgusting way how you lost your virginity at 14. And so it took me a little while, but I actually had somebody kind of keep all of the messages, even the ones on Facebook, and go through everything. And a few weeks later after I kind of recovered, I started going through everything and I had thought it was going to be okay, there we go. Okay, now I can move on or whatever.
But there were so many stories that I realized I can't walk away from this. These also need to be told. And so that's how it kind of began, because everybody started out with Dear Lara, this happened to me with this teacher at this school. And I realized it was global and endemic, and basically so many times the same thing happened that the institution protected the man and basically threw away the woman or the child like trash. I thought, well, I have to do something about this, so let's tell these stories and let's get them out there. So that became this film, which is Dear Lara, which is coming out imminently.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's such an incredibly difficult and important topic, and I want to thank you for privately sharing this film with me. I was able to see it and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful film about a horrible thing. So congratulations on the film.
Lara St. John:
Thanks. Yeah. Well, it's really not at all just me. It's a lot of other people who gave their stories to this film, and it wouldn't have been this way three years ago, interestingly enough. But somehow the zeitgeist is changing and everybody in the film uses their own face and their own name. There is no anonymity. And even though I very much understand people who need to be anonymous, it is stronger if they're not. If you stand behind and completely face with your own persona what's been done to you. And so I think that makes the film quite a stronger, in fact, the lack of anonymity.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's heartbreaking. All these different but similar stories and beautiful music that you've woven in, which is going to be coming out in an album as well.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, I think I'm going to bring out the Dear Lara soundtrack, which is kind of interesting because some of it's prerecorded because we also go into other stories having to do with other institutions such as orchestras. And at that point, I'm not going to hire an entire orchestra to do something because mostly I did with string quintet for the soundtrack. So I use some prerecorded material that I own from my own label. And so it's interesting because it goes from sort of string quintet to historical stuff like me playing when I was 14 and then over into the great Schubert eight and then back out to, yeah, I mean there's themes that are woven throughout. Schubert kind of comes in and out of it. The trope of Death in the Maiden really kind of makes me think of what it is that happened to us. I mean, we were basically handed a life sentence, or as you saw in the film, some of us a death sentence. And so I used an arrangement that I did for so while and quite a lot of Death and the Maiden itself. And then comes the Schubert eight, in comes Schubert three. So there's a little bit of that throughout, and little quotes here and there to foreshadow the big symphony coming in with Katherine Needleman, for example.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, Katherine was on this podcast last year and
Lara St. John:
Yeah, yeah,
Leah Roseman:
She's so busy with all the activism she does, but she used to publish these redacted letters that she would receive a lot of them about similar situations. It was just absolutely heartbreaking. When your article first came out in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I had seen it and I was just flabbergasted 'cause I knew the name Jascha Brodsky, and I'd heard stuff about him because yeah, it's like this whisper campaign.
Lara St. John:
Yeah
Leah Roseman:
There's many other famous and not so famous. I'd heard so many stories over the years about the most appalling behavior. And I do think classical music is, well, I think you've said it. It's particularly dangerous for children, right?
Lara St. John:
Well, yeah, there are very few professions where you have an 8-year-old in a room with a man, one on one. You don't have that in English literature. You don't have 8-year-old accountants or physicists. So I think this kind of child abuse tends to happen much more in these sorts of situations. Also, these men, supposedly, as Katherine would say, big fancy men are given ridiculous messianic amounts of power over the children, over the parents, over the institution even. And that's a big problem because as I said before, the institution will absolutely back the man and not the woman or the child, they're seen as disposable, but the man is not because I guess the man is famous. So we must protect that name at all costs. And that's what the institutions have done forever. That's what they did to me and to pretty much everyone else in my film and what they continue to do.
And that's one big reason for this film is that this has to stop. I don't ever want anyone to be in the position I was in. I don't want any woman to have to choose between having sex with her teacher or her career ever again. And the only way to do that is to use, it's trite to say, but sunlight as a disinfection, all these stories have to be blown completely open. And you may have noticed that in my film, most of the women are kind of close to my age, if not my age. I'm 54 now. When I came out about my child abuse, I was 48, which is approximately actually a couple of years early then. I mean usually it's in the early fifties that people who suffered child abuse come up. And I want it to be possible for 19 year olds to say, Hey, this happened without it ruining their career anymore.
Or Hey, this almost happened to me. This shouldn't happen. But they can't because of the preposterous amount of power, because of the fact that these men will then say, oh, don't work with her she'll and there'll be blacklisted and we have to stop that because what it is, it's a massive brain, brain, and there are so many women who have been abused out of the music world and who have just left the music world because it was ruined for them by this abuse. And some of those could have been, I mean, can you imagine the amount of talent that's just gone by the wayside? Half of the people that wrote to me are not in the profession anymore. Half of those don't even listen to music anymore. Any kind of music, the whole thing, what they loved, what they thought they were going to give their lives to was ruined by the greed of one man.
Leah Roseman:
And to be clear, I mean, it's not always just women who are victims.
Lara St. John:
No, no. We do actually have one man in the film as well. Yeah, I mean everybody knew, I guess you could say about James Levine, everybody's always known about James Levine and nobody ever did anything. And that was not women, let's put it that way. But but in general, the majority that I've seen, or at least who have reached out to me, the vast majority does tend to be women.
Leah Roseman:
So since you have become very vocal about this, has it affected your career, do you think negatively or positively?
Lara St. John:
That's a good question because it's actually a hard answer because of the fact that COVID happened just after this all came out. And so nobody did anything for a year and a half. Then after that, I think COVID taught me that maybe I don't want to be on the road half the time anymore.
Maybe I do kind of want to calm down a little bit and not have to do this. And I sort looked around and thought to myself, I mean, this year at 54 years old, I've now been working for 50 years. So that's more than most people. I mean, I played my first concerto when I was four years old with Windsor Symphony. I mean, I got paid for it. So I've been working for 50 years, and I realized that since 2019, since I've spoken to so many people, done sort of a lot of my own little investigations here and there, I know so much about so many people that I don't want to be in this profession anymore. And so back in, I'm sort of trying to retire and slowly retiring. My brother has now completely retired. Really, he's never going to play another note. He retired April of 2025 and yeah, he's just so disgusted with the music field as well.
And so, so I don't see why I should want to be in a field that has treated me this way. Now, that doesn't mean that I won't ever do anything again, but it has to be something that I'm really interested in or that it's a friend's orchestra or it's a place I really want to go. So I have some of those things coming up, like Dina Gilbert with Walla Walla, it's her first season out there. She's like, will you come out? I was like, oh, okay. Of course I'm doing a, well, it's a benefit concert actually for Rebecca Bryant Novak in Rochester. She was unfairly expelled from Eastman for complaining about harassment. That's another school with the cesspool under it.
And then next year I have to actually learn a concerto, which I'm getting lazy in my old age, but it has to be worthwhile to learn the Kurt Weill Concerto, and it will be because it's in Parma in Italy. So I'm really excited about that. So these sorts of things will happen, but at the moment, I'm just more interested in the film, being there with the film, being there for Q&As, traveling around with it, talking to people and just doing what it is. I love. The world doesn't need another Mendelssohn concerto from me or a Tchaikovsky here and there or something like that.
Leah Roseman:
Well, just to say you're just a phenomenal violinist and I'd be happy to hear you play any concerto. But actually just the burnout with the same repertoire, I completely get that.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, it's not interesting for me. Lots of people do it just fine and for me to do something new to set up, ideally at some point a new commissioning body to set up a foundation to help people that when they speak up, they get sued by their perpetrators. I mean, I want to help the Katie Berglof thing out in Seattle and all this kind of stuff. So I mean, that's a little bit more what I want to be doing. And I think partly why I sort of did so much all these years, it was survival because I was like, okay, this is the only way I can survive. It's all I know how to do. I mean, my last academic grade was seven for God's sakes. I wouldn't be able to go even back to high school without some. It's so ridiculous. I'm such a one trick pony, and it's just always been like, okay, I have to make enough money to do this.
I have to survive. I have to survive. I have to survive. And then all of a sudden during COVID, I was like, well, actually, I've been working hard for a long time. I own an apartment. I own my violin, so I don't actually have to work that hard anymore. And it just the light bulb that went on over my head when I was suddenly like, oh my God, I don't have to hustle. I don't have to. And it was kind of a really amazing moment to tell my manager, don't hustle for me anymore. If something comes through and I want to do it, I will, but let's just calm everything down and I'm going to slowly move to other things.
Leah Roseman:
Well, Lara, what do you think about this hyper competitive world of child prodigies and classical music and how that affects people's outlook in life? Would you have advice for parents who are worried about their kids succeeding, who are very talented?
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Katherine Needleman, Bente Illevold, Samantha Ege, Naomi Moon Siegel and Yolanda Bruno. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Lara.
Lara St. John:
I mean, when we were kids, it's hard really for me to remember it, but yeah, there were a lot of jealous parents I remember because we didn't seem to have to work very hard to achieve success. I guess it was just very natural or something, my brother and I, and we just, things happened quickly and naturally, and I don't think I ever in my life practiced more than two or three hours a day. And sometimes when I would do a masterclass, I'd get these parents coming up and proudly telling me that their kid practices six to seven hours a day. Just I would recoil in disgust. I mean, I just think that's just wrong. If you have to spend your entire day doing this, you shouldn't be doing this. You should put your energy towards something else that is obviously not music.
But yeah, I mean there's all these competitions and stuff these days. I guess I see it on the violin channel and a few things that I follow, and I guess, I don't know, are they good? I don't think so. I guess it is good in a way because there's a goal. You have to learn this piece and then you play this piece and you have a place to play it. But it seems to go against what this means in the first place. It's not like who can do it the fastest? And it feels to me like competitions are kind of about who can play this the fastest or whatever. I judged an international competition once and I'll never do it again. It was awful. And the person who had by far the most beautiful Mozart and Beethoven by far got kicked out. Of course, they played a note out of tune in Paganini, and I was just, what is this about? It's not about music anymore. So I don't very much love those, but it's not for me to say they shouldn't exist. People want to keep doing them. It's up to them, but I won't have anything to do with them.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I think a lot of us really admire you because you're so strong and so brave. And even as a 17-year-old, I mean, you found this crazy opportunity to go to the former USSR.
Lara St. John:
Well, that was partly, yeah. I mean, I look back and that was pretty fricking brave. That's true. I was 17 and I went by myself. Well, I think it was partly I wanted to get as far away as possible from that stupid school. So I put an ocean and an iron curtain between myself and it, and to be honest, it was really the best thing I could possibly have done. Nobody knew me there and nobody knew what I'd come from. And so I was kind of able to start myself anew
Sounds a little silly. And for the first time I was learning about life, I'd been, like at Curtis, in any given year, you maybe meet 30 new people all of a sudden. Here I am in the (Russian word) living with 800 new people, all of them from places I've hardly even heard of before the Stans and North Korea and a whole bunch of Cubans. And it was just amazing to meet these folks. And thanks to my father, we grew up bilingual and because of that, and I guess like a musical ear and absolute total immersion, it actually wasn't that hard to be speaking Russian by about a month and a half, two months in. My roommate was Moldavian. So at first we kind of understood each other through Moldavian and French, but it's actually very far away. So finally she just threw up her hands and said, come on, we have to learn Russian and, and drilled me every morning on the tra tra sra sra, to get that tongue rolling. And so she's a great teacher.
Leah Roseman:
Are you still in touch with some people you met at that time?
Lara St. John:
Very much so, yeah. Especially some of the, well, I guess then Yugoslavs and now Montenegrans or Serbians or Croatians. And even when I meet somebody who I didn't really know then, but a little bit, it's almost like we were once in jail. Outside of jail, it's like, oh my God, how have you been for the last 35 years? And all of a sudden we're the best of friends because we both had this experience in Moscow. So yeah, definitely it was the best thing I ever could have done. I think it probably saved my life.
Leah Roseman:
And you were the first classical artist to start your own record company?
Lara St. John:
I believe so, yeah. First solo at least. Yeah, I did that in actually 2000, 99, 2000 is when I started the company and mostly did it just because I wanted to just be sure that everything I put out there forever, because recordings forever was something that I believed in and could do with utmost integrity. I started hearing about colleagues of mine and stuff being told by their record label here, do all these sonatas for violin and sackbut. Okay, not that, but in fact, that would be really cool. I've always wanted to do something with sackbut just because I love saying sackbut, but I didn't want that. So I started my own label, and I've been with that ever since with a little sort of not great fated jump over to Sony as an experiment, but then back to my own label, which I still have.
Leah Roseman:
There's another album. You have many great albums out there. I encourage people to listen to them all. But your album, She/ Her/Hers from 2022, and I guess partly because of the pandemic, you didn't do that much. You did some publicity around it, but not everyone maybe will have heard it, so I'm hoping we could talk a little bit about that.
Lara St. John:
Well, I mean, it's not like the Bach concertos. It's not something you're going to put on for fun necessarily. It's more because you're interested in solo violin music and music by women. It was a pandemic project. I actually did it in an empty office because it was possible to have a huge empty office with mahogany lined walls, and it had great acoustics, and so I just moved in some recording equipment and did it there. Yeah, I mean, women that I'd been fans of for a long time, I did some solo violin pieces by them. For example, Valerie Coleman, who's probably commissioned up the wazoo until from 10 years, she has a flute piece, which is really nice. So I just kind of arranged it for violin and recorded it on violin, did some stuff by Ana Sokolović. There are some really great Caprices by Eckhardt-Gramatté, Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, that people play the Paganini all the time, and only occasional Canadians will have heard of these 10 caprices that she wrote, and I think they're way more interesting. They all have stories behind them. She was a violinist and a pianist, so they're both sort of, overachiever there, and they're very violinistic and great fun to play. So I recorded a bunch of those and commissioned a couple of things and then just kind of put them all together.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's such a great album. And I knew Anna Sokolović's music. I played some of it here in my orchestra, so I was hoping we could include at least a clip of maybe the Danza.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, I think I did on the recording. Danza two and four. Danza two is I do that one quite a lot live. It's very effective. Her music is always, it's just at that crux of almost not possible, but it's always possible. But she makes you work. It's never easy, but it's always worth it.(clip of Ana Sokolović Danza 2 from She/Her/Hers)
Leah Roseman:
Just in terms of working with living composers, I mean, do you ever push back and say, look, this is possible, but
Lara St. John:
Yes, all the time, especially when folks are pianists, then I'll just be like, this is not worth it. This is how much I'm going to have to work to do this. If I change this to a sixth, it's so much easier. I often make stuff way more violinistic. I've worked a lot with Martin Kennedy, Gene Pritsker. Martin Kennedy's a pianist, and at one point, I premiered his concerto a couple of years ago with Omaha, and at one point he had something in F Sharp major, and I said, okay, we're going to just put that up a half-tone. And he managed to modulate it, so it worked fine and everything. And I was like, I mean it was all these double stops way up high. I just, no, I need my open strings. Got to change it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, a couple of people have told me that by the time they were playing something, it had already been premiered elsewhere and it was too late to push back. So if you're the one playing it for the first time, it's a great opportunity to have that interaction.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, I guess so. I mean honestly, well, it doesn't really matter anymore, but don't tell the students, but I changed stuff in Dvořák Concerto, for example. The stuff that I find is too awkward. There's a bunch of things in Tchaikovsky where I'll just do one finger straight up the G-string. That sounded dirty. It's really not, I don't call it faking if it sounds better than what it would be if you actually did it. So I consider myself an expert faker, but if something's about to be premiered and if something needs to be changed for posterity, yeah, I'll make sure that it's done. There's no sense in working on things that are awkward if they could easily be changed. I mean, what a waste of time.
Leah Roseman:
There was a composer on that album I wasn't familiar with Gabriela, Elena Frank.
Lara St. John:
Oh yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Her beautiful piece. It means fireflies Lucier and Naga Luc.
Lara St. John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, she's actually very well known in the States. She's out in San Francisco area. And in fact, she just did an opera on Frida Kahlo that was the first Spanish language opera at San Francisco Opera. And yeah, she's a really great, her really interesting background. Her mother is a Peruvian and her father American, and so she kind of grew up in both places and was really inspired by some of the traditional music of Peru, which came out in, she did this beautiful solo suite for solo violin (clip of Luciérnagas by Gabriela Lena Frank, from She/Her/Hers)
Leah Roseman:
Just to back up for a second, the first Spanish language opera ever in San Francisco. That's kind of shocking, right?
Lara St. John:
Well, yes, I guess, because obviously they've done lots in Italian, but it is, when you think about it, and I wish I'd love to hear it. I think there might be a recording coming out. But yeah, it's just called Frida, I think,
Leah Roseman:
And people who follow you, especially on YouTube and social media. See, you've always had this sense of fun, and you put out really fun videos and connected with this album (Shiksa). You have this track where there's a bar fight. I can't pronounce the name of this tune
Lara St. John:
Variaiuni. Yeah, it's a Romanian. That was a funny shoot. Yeah, it's a Romanian Roma tune kind of more or less adapted a little bit by me. And yeah, that's a hilarious video bar fight. It's an actual bar fight. And we did it at the old Cameron in Toronto, so I'm sure a lot of your listeners would know the old Cameron.(clip of video Variaiuni Bar Fight, linked in show notes and on album Shiksa)
Leah Roseman:
And actually, we were just speaking about Gabrielle, Elena, Frank, and Peru. So your first trip there in 1988, and you'd posted about this pretty recently returning there and your continuing relationship with Peru.
Lara St. John:
Cool. Yeah, I first went, actually right before I went to Russia, so I don't know. All of a sudden my last year in Curtis, there was a suicide attempt, which obviously didn't work because I'm talking to you. And somehow after that I just kind of thought, well, I don't want to say it sort of freed me, but suddenly it was like, oh, extra time. And I met somebody who said, if you ever find yourself in South America, come on by. And I thought, well, I've never been there, why don't I go? So I literally just went and turned up on his doorstep, and it was a wonderful couple of weeks, and in Peru went up to Cusco to Iquitos, and I had just turned 17 years old, and it was finally seeing the world, not through concert halls, because I had done all these tours in Europe and stuff as a child and stuff, but just as a normal person. And it was really great. And I've been going back ever since. I think this last time was probably my 13th time there or something. And every single time, I'm just so happy to be there. I really love it.
Leah Roseman:
And Lara, it might've been when you were writing about Peru that I read, it seemed kind of funny, you auditioned for the Marlboro Festival with the Bach Chaconne, which is solo, for those that don't know, but you had a pianist that you paid to sit there because you had to have a piano.
Lara St. John:
Well, yeah. Also, I had the Beethoven Concerto, I think Prokofiev F Minor Sonata.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay!
Lara St. John:
I mean, there's all sorts of things that you were supposed to play. And they said, here, start with the Bach. And so I did, and then there's a big minor section, and I'm like, that's weird that I'm playing all this. And I remember looking over and nobody said anything, so I just kept going. And then, I don't know, I played a quartet excerpt or something like that, and then they were like, okay, thanks. And I left the room and my pianist is like, what the heck was I doing here? So yeah, it was weird. I mean, I got in, I guess the word for it is, but I was so messed up. I had never even played a string quartet in my first summer at Marlboro. I didn't know anything about anything. So I was in a way kind of too young to be there. And I don't know, I think it was Felix Galimir who really pushed for me to be there. And he made sure that he was in most of my groups, and he was a really fantastic teacher and person, and I'm really grateful for him. But I mean, he must've been really frustrated. I was just messed up and didn't really know what I was doing.
Leah Roseman:
How old were you?
Lara St. John:
That was the summer I had just turned 17, so it was crazy. I was like, I went to Peru, I went to Marlboro, and then I went to the USSR, and then I went to Marlboro the summer after as well, after the USSR as a very different person. And it was great
Leah Roseman:
Coming back there after your experience.
Lara St. John:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Lara St. John:
It was definitely, definitely different that you're - changed me a lot but for the better, I would say. And I was much more perceptive. I mean, I know my brother enjoyed being also a senior member a lot at Marlboro until he didn't. And it was, I guess good to learn about stuff, but it was very, very cliquey. And most of my friends, certainly the first year, everybody treated me really badly. So my friends were in the kitchen staff, my only friends. And then the second year I had some friends, but they weren't musicians. They worked in the library or I guess I was just seen as some sort of weird pariah or something.
Leah Roseman:
Well, what did you learn from Felix Galimir, he was quite a legend.
Lara St. John:
Yeah. Well, a lot of things. Like at Curtis, I knew that somebody in a string quartet would always oversleep one of the first coachings. And so I was always kind of there ready to do Bartók solo sonata for him, or I would wake up a pianist, and I remember doing the Schoenberg fantasy with him and Bartók's second sonata, and that was all with him. It was like thanks to him that I actually learned something from that school thanks to him. And Edward Aldwell, the theory teacher who, none of whom were actually my teachers, but they taught me a lot.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, do you want to talk about, although you dropped out of school, you had worked with several teachers on and off in the early years. Is there any other mentor that you wanted to talk about?
Lara St. John:
There was somebody that I met at the New School the year before I went to Curtis. His name is Joey Corpus, and he passed away just a couple of years ago, and he was from the Philippines. And he basically taught me everything I know about playing the violin, about the actual mechanical stuff. He taught me how to teach myself because I needed to know that because nobody ever really taught me that in any school. And for a long time, he was known as sort of the underground guru of New York. A lot of freelance musicians and stuff would go play for him, and he was really, really beloved. And we stayed friends until he died. And yeah, he was a wonderful, wonderful mentor and just always so encouraging and just such great ideas, so many ways of experimenting with, well, if this isn't working, maybe this would. And he taught me patience. And those things are hard to learn if you're, and especially when things have been broken for a while to sort of mend them. And he managed to sort of reignite my once love of music, I guess.
Leah Roseman:
How old were you when you were working with him then?
Lara St. John:
Well, actually when I was at Curtis as well. Yeah. Well, I didn't really in name, I guess we study with Arnold Steinhardt, but that was the heyday of the Guarneri Quartet. So he was there maybe once every two or three months, but I mean, he's great, but what are you going to do once every two or three months? So yeah, I say I studied with Joey in later in my second year when they switched teachers, and then all of my third year of Curtis, so it would be him, Galimir and Edward Allwell.
Leah Roseman:
What were lessons with him like?
Lara St. John:
Well, they usually involved food and sometimes the watching of various old movies and stuff like that. But yeah, just how to really, really listen to yourself. He would also teach you how to, at some point, some of his former students, and one of them recorded a lot of lessons and took down everything. We want to sort of create a book about what it was that he gave us and the wisdom that he imparted because just quality over quantity is what I learned from him. So I was able to learn things really quickly just because he taught me how to start and never make a false start because that will go into your memory. And it does to this day. I still play wrong notes in Zigeunerweisen. I still play wrong notes all over the place because I learned them that way and I can't change. And just that kind of patience of when you start a new piece to figure out what this page is going to be harder than this page, so make sure you start with this one. And these are just things that people should have told me as a kid, but they just never really bothered, I guess. And he taught me that intonation is in the ear. I always thought it was in the fingers. That was such a revelation.
So yeah, he was definitely my great mentor along with Galimir and Aldwell.
Leah Roseman:
Anything else about the way he addressed phrasing or bow arm or any other by and nerdy stuff?
Lara St. John:
Well, I don't know if you noticed this with people that you hear these days, but one of our big pet peeves was, I call it portato. And it just feels as though everybody, nobody can pull a straight line anymore.
I can say. Everybody goes like, (singing ha ha ha ha). And I've taught this in a couple of masterclasses as well. He'd be like, oh, you're portatoing. No, I'm not. Yes, you are. So play it. Play the tune in your mind. Play the tune on the whatever, E string A string, and only play your G-string. And it's amazing. You see your bow go like this, and then you're like, oh, shoot, I'm really portatoing. That's terrible. And then you learn to, but it's a great trick to make sure you don't portato, but a lot of people don't seem to realize how ugly it is and how sort of heaving, and I've heard even soloists and may I say even members of my own family to do lots of just strange portato and I don't know why. And it's in orchestras actually all over the place as well, worldwide.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's something my teacher had addressed with me, and I've always been super conscious of it. And when I listen to auditions, I am really listening for it. So when I work on it with people, first of all, if you remove vibrato, it can reveal it. Sometimes it's connected with shifts, but it is people, I mean, it comes from a place of people wanting to express themselves. It comes from the emotion. It's just
Lara St. John:
Are you sure? I think it comes from fear. I think it comes from not wanting to be the first in orchestras anyway. They don't want to be the first to play the note. So they're kind of (singing) like this waiting until, and so it just puts everything out of time and makes it sound heave-y
Leah Roseman:
Maybe in an ensemble setting like that. But I mean, when someone's playing a beautiful big soaring melody in a concerto and they're using that sort of stopping thing, I think that's where I don't think they're not hearing it right, like you were saying, learning to hear.
Lara St. John:
Yeah,I, it's something, I mean, it's something when I've judged various things. I only did one international competition, but I've done a couple of chamber music things and the Canada Council Instrument Bank, the Sphinx and stuff, and that's something I always look for. And sometimes I'm like, oh my God, this person is so good at everything else. And yet ruins every big phrase because of portato. So yeah, it seems to be a bit of a scourge in string playing right now. Well, actually, not right now. I guess I've been noticing it since Joey taught me to look out for it. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
It was wonderful to hear about him. I hadn't heard about him before. So maybe to wrap it up, do you want to talk a little bit about becoming a filmmaker and how it's similar or different than music?
Lara St. John:
Well, it's very different than music, actually. I've kind of jumped in the deep end by sort of just making a film, being its director and learning how to get it out there into the world. It's very, very different than just audio, I guess. Yeah, it's a whole new world for me. And people have said, well, once this one's out there and gone everywhere, what's going to happen? I'm not really sure. I mean, it's been an incredible amount of work and life force to make this film. So is that something I want to do again? I'm not entirely sure, but I've definitely learned a lot. And we had a great editor as well, Christie Herring, and she would always, whenever I would say, well, I don't know, why is this here? Why wouldn't it be? She would always have a reason, well, we need this so that this will, and that, I really like that kind of thing. Always having a reason for doing something rather than just like, well, it felt right. And again, I bring that back to music because in masterclasses I'll be like, why are you doing this? And the student will say, well, my teacher told me to. And that's just the worst answer to me that you could ever have. It's like, well, what do you think? Well, I don't know. Well then why are you doing this? And so that was great from an editing standpoint, because I've been editing my own music videos for 15 years, but a full length documentary is a very different kettle of fish, of course. And I learned a lot from her. So yeah, I'm getting to know a lot more film people and learn more about a profession that's interesting to me. Well, I mean, I think film's interesting to almost everybody, but it's certainly something that I do not regret having spent five and a half years on this film.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Lara St. John:
Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
