ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 8, 1995 TAG: 9512080043
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
If Custer LaRue looks familiar but you can't quite figure out why, there's an explanation. The vocalist for The Baltimore Consort got some heavy, unanticipated exposure recently when two major record clubs used the cover of her CD, ''The Daemon Lover'' in their print ads.
For about a year, it seemed you couldn't pick up a copy of Parade magazine or Cosmo or the New York Times without seeing the Bath County native's face as the representative classical album choice on blow-in cards and four-color ads for the BMG and Columbia House CD clubs.
``I don't normally go around with my hair pulled back in a french braid and a black shirt with silver jewelry,'' said LaRue, who now lives in Staunton with her 12-year-old son, George. ``I've seen so many bad reproductions of that picture.''
The ad campaign has resulted in a few strangers stopping her - not an everyday experience even for big-name classical music stars - and she's not sure she likes it.
``To tell you the truth, the idea of being accosted by people is frightening. When it's happened it's really given me the shakes.''
But she'll be on home ground, or almost, anyway when the Baltimore Consort does a concert at Roanoke College Saturday night.
``I grew up on a farm right at the foot of Warm Springs mountain and it was very isolated,'' said LaRue. It wasn't a pretend farm for homesteading city folks, either, but a working operation where her dad raised sheep and used horses as draft animals.
LaRue is the second big name in classical music to be associated with Bath County, the other being the Garth Newell summer chamber music festival. And make no mistake: The Baltimore Consort is a big name indeed in the world of early music, which over the past quarter century has gone from being the enthusiasm of a few cranks and scholars to a major component of the classical music market.
When you ask her the places she's toured, it's easier to tick off where she HASN'T been. ``Well, we haven't gone to Australia yet and we haven't been to Japan, but I'm sure we'll go there sometime.''
Recent tours have included the world-famous early music festival in Regensburg, Germany, and concert dates in Vienna and Holland. When the six-person group finishes Saturday night in Salem, they're headed for Toronto.
To say that The Baltimore Consort's record label is pleased is an understatement. ``They're among our best-selling artists of all time,'' said Linda McKay Feldmann, media director for Dorian Records in Troy, N.Y.
Custer LaRue has been profiled in USA Today, the group has appeared frequently on NPR's ``Performance Today,'' and two CDs - ``The Art of the Bawdy Song'' and ``The Daemon Lover'' - were on Billboard Magazine's top classical crossover chart in 1993.
Her childhood was ``very, very unremarkable,'' said LaRue. Her mother was her first music teacher (``She sang all the time, constantly''), and she began piano lessons at age five. She attended Millboro Elementary School and graduated from Valley High School in the '70s. After four years at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, she attended Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
It was at Peabody that LaRue learned that she wasn't cut out for the opera or oratorio stage. Though she has a voice of remarkable expressiveness and purity, it's not the kind of big vocal cannon that opera singers need. After a year and a half of LaRue's trying to project her voice over the school orchestra with indifferent success, her teacher figured it was time for a little heart-to-heart talk.
```It's not that you can't do it musically,' she said, `but it's just that there are always going to be so many other singers who can outgun you.' And at that point she really insisted that I start working on lute songs, Machaut and all that really early stuff,'' recalled LaRue.
It was a new musical universe for the singer, who quickly discovered that she loved medieval and Renaissance-era music. She was especially good at working with the many languages and dialects that must be mastered by early music specialists.
LaRue explains it with an analogy from the family farm: ``It's like when you train a horse to do a certain thing and they just love to get up there and do it. I like to get immersed in the fine points of diction and pronuciation, when you have just a one-line melody printed on an old manuscript and a poem - it's really raw material in the early stages and you have to make it come back to life.''
She is a founding member of The Baltimore Consort, which has been a rock of stability by the standards of the music world: half the six members are founders, and the newest joined up a decade ago. The group formed at about the time the early music movement was beginning to achieve orbital velocity, and it's been a steady job ever since.
The group's latest recording spotlights LaRue in a collection of Appalachian ballads titled ``The True Lover's Farewell,'' which is dedicated to the memory of the singer's husband, Riley Haws, who died in May 1994. The CD, which contains a number of tracks with LaRue's heartbreakingly beautiful soprano all by itself, has gotten crossover and classical airplay on radio stations all over America.
Tomorrow night's concert at Olin Hall on the Roanoke College campus will be devoted to Christmas music, with both European Renaissance-era selections and southern Appalachian ballads and carols. Seats still remain with tickets priced at $10; curtain time is 8 p.m.
THE BALTIMORE CONSORT: Saturday at 8 p.m. in Olin Hall at Roanoke College. Tickets are $10
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Custer LaRue (kneeling at left) is The Baltimoreby CNBConsort's vocalist and a native of Bath County.