{"id":100686,"date":"2023-12-01T14:28:08","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T19:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=100686"},"modified":"2023-12-05T09:30:22","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T14:30:22","slug":"interview-lara-st-john-talks-21c-music-festival-concerts-women-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2023\/12\/01\/interview-lara-st-john-talks-21c-music-festival-concerts-women-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW | Lara St. John Talks About Her 21C Music Festival Concerts And Women In Classical Music"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lara
Lara St. John (Photo: J. Farley)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Violinist Lara St. John will be back in Toronto for the RCM\u2019s 21C Music Festival<\/a> in January for a couple of engagements. She\u2019ll be performing in Fazil Say\u2019s concert of his own original pieces, as well as headlining her own concert.<\/p>\n

Lara, with brother and fellow violinist Scott St. John, Winona Zelenka (cello) and Barry Schiffman (viola), will be performing a piano quintet by Say titled The Moving Mansion, op. 72c, Hommage \u00e0 Atat\u00fcrk on January 19, and her own concert of solo violin works takes place January 20.<\/p>\n

Lara St. John<\/h2>\n

As a performer, Lara St. John\u2019s career has taken her from Seattle to Strasbourg, the Akbank Chamber Orchestra in Turkey to Australia, from South America to Japan and China, and pretty much all points in between.\u00a0She\u2019s performed on the world\u2019s finest concert halls, including recitals in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Ravinia, Wolf Trap, Washington, D.C., Prague, Berlin, Toronto, Montreal, Bogot\u00e1, Lima and the Forbidden City.<\/p>\n

Lara has long been known as a proponent of new works, and has commissioned or premiered pieces by Matthew Hindson, Martin Kennedy, John Corigliano, Gene Pritsker, Serouj Kradjian, Tarik O\u2019Regan and John Psathas, among others.<\/p>\n

After founding her own label Ancalagon in 199, she went on to produce a string of well received and best-selling albums, including her Bach: The Six Sonatas & Partitas for Violin Solo (best-selling double album on iTunes in 2007), and the JUNO Award-winning Mozart recording with The Knights in 2011.<\/p>\n

\"Lara
Lara St. John (Photo: Clive Barda)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Interview<\/h2>\n

At her own concert for the 21C Music Festival on January 20, Lara will be drawing from her most recent release, 2022\u2019s \u2640She\/Her\/Hers. It puts the spotlight on women composers, featuring 17 pieces by 12 artists.<\/p>\n

\u2640She\/Her\/Hers includes work by Milica Paranosic; Jessica Meyer; Gabriela Lena Frank; Adah Kaplan; Valerie Coleman; Laurie Anderson; Melissa Dunphy; Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt Gramatt\u00e9; Micheline Coulombe St. Marcoux; Jessie Montgomery; Ana Sokolovi\u0107; and Laura de Rover.\u00a0One or two, such as Laurie Anderson and Ana Sokolovi\u0107, already have a public profile. Still, the list of neglected women composers is still very long.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a little bit of a pandemic project,\u201d she explains. The forced downtime of the lockdowns gave her the time to explore what she was always curious about. Lara began listening to women composers, and others who bucked the overwhelming majority of white men.<\/p>\n

She was also able to use a mahogany-lined salon in the historical Atterbury House in Manhattan, and it led to a recording project focusing on works for solo violin written by women.<\/p>\n

Some of the pieces were written for Lara, and others she simply connected with. In the case of Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise composer Micheline Coulombe St. Marcoux, Lara admired not only her work, but what it must have taken to become a composer as a woman in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve been a fan of Valerie Coleman for years,\u201d she adds. Coleman is extremely busy, so Lara took a piece of hers for flute and plays it on the violin.<\/p>\n

Finding new music is always a goal. \u201cI’m always on the lookout for more stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

New work can also mean rediscovered work, however. \u201cWomen have been writing since the 17th, 18th centuries,\u201d she says. \u201cA lot of stuff got lost because nobody cared about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lara St. John performs Confronting the Sky by Jessica Meyer:<\/p>\n