Bach Violin Concertos – Lara St. John

Lara St. John has never lacked for nerve. This is the violinist who put her own bare-shouldered image on a Bach album cover a few years back and got the classical world clutching its pearls — a marketing gambit that half the critics decided disqualified her from serious consideration before they’d even cued up the disc. That was unfair then, and it would be unfair now. The playing on this new set of the two solo concertos, the Double, and the G minor sonata answers the old complaint pretty conclusively: whatever you think of the packaging, the woman can play.

Start with the sound itself. Her Guadagnini has a burnished warmth in the lower register. You hear it right away in the opening ritornello of the A minor concerto, BWV 1041, where the tone sits fat and dark against the ensemble rather than floating thinly above it, the way some gut-string-minded fiddlers prefer. This is Bach played by someone who came up in the modern violin tradition and isn’t apologizing for it. No swooning vibrato, mind you. She’s absorbed enough of the historically informed lesson to keep the line lean where Bach wants leanness. But there’s a sensuous core to the sound that period players mostly deny themselves. I found it seductive more often than not.

The New York Bach Ensemble, for its part, stays largely out of the way. That’s a compliment and also, a little, a complaint. Ensemble playing in these concertos ought to argue with the soloist now and then — Bach wrote dialogue, not accompaniment, especially in the outer movements of the E major concerto, BWV 1042, where the ripieno violins toss material back at the soloist almost combatively. Here the group recedes into a supportive wash, competent but reticent, and the performances tip toward the soloistic rather than the conversational. It is very much St. John’s show.

Where the show is best: the slow movements. The Andante of BWV 1041 unfolds with a long-breathed, singing patience, and she resists the temptation to over-inflect the repeated bass figure underneath. The Adagio of the E major concerto has real gravity, phrases shaped with a cellist’s sense of weight rather than a violinist’s impatience to move along.

The Double Concerto brings in Scott St. John — her brother, though the notes don’t make a fuss about it — and the two play with the easy, almost telepathic synchronization you’d expect from musicians who’ve spent childhoods trading phrases across a breakfast table. Their Largo ma non tanto is the loveliest thing on the disc after the sonata: two lines twining without either one grabbing for primacy. Oistrakh and Menuhin famously fought a polite tug-of-war over who got the last word in this movement. Here there’s no fight at all.

But the real reason to own this record is track ten onward: the G minor sonata, BWV 1001, played unaccompanied, St. John alone with the instrument and the room. This is where a violinist stands or falls with Bach, no ensemble to hide behind, no continuo to fill the silences. Her “Adagio” opens with a dignity that doesn’t oversell itself, all long bow strokes and unhurried double-stops. Then the “Fuga” — and here I’ll go further than most reviewers have gone: this is genuinely fine fugal violin playing, voices distinguished with real clarity of bow distribution, the architecture audible even at speed. You can practically follow the entries with your eyes closed. Milstein had this same gift of making four voices out of one instrument feel inevitable rather than effortful. St. John doesn’t match him, not quite, but she’s in that conversation, which is no small thing to say of a player barely into her thirties when this was recorded.

The “Siciliana” sings without cloying. The closing “Presto” has real fire, though here, and only here, I sensed the virtuoso elbowing the performer aside a little, the tempo pushed for excitement’s sake rather than emerging from the music’s own logic. It’s a small lapse. Everywhere else on this disc, the balance between technical command and interpretive patience holds.

Does this unseat Milstein, or Grumiaux, or more recent period-instrument accounts from the likes of Rachel Podger, as first choice for this repertoire? No. The concertos, in particular, want a more argumentative ensemble partner than St. John gets here, and listeners committed to gut strings and light vibrato will find her tone too plush for their taste. But taken on its own terms, this is playing of real intelligence and considerable beauty, particularly in the solo sonata, which alone justifies the disc’s price. St. John was heading for the majors when this was made, and you can hear exactly why. The image was never the point. The bow arm was.