Interview with Violinist Leila Josefowicz: Being Open to New Music

November 12, 2025, 11:31 AM · When it comes to new music, violinist Leila Josefowicz has some advice: "Feel it and hear it, and be open," she said. "That's all. You don't have to 'get it.'"

Over her career Josefowicz has become an absolute force for new music. She has the technique and intellect to find meaning in the thorniest of new scores - and she also has the gutsy and audacious stage presence to transform them into thrilling live performances.

But how did she get there? From prodigy to fierce advocate for new music - this was not a straightforward path. "It took many years, figuring that all out," Leila told me, during a Zoom interview in October. "I had a very strange start to my career.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz. Photo by Tom Zimberoff.

Friday marks the release of a new recording that has great meaning for her - her performance of Thomas Adès' Violin Concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra, under the baton of Music Director Thomas Søndergård. Josefowicz is a longtime champion of the work, having performed it internationally for more than 20 years.

On the eve of this release Josefowicz spoke with me about her unusual path, about how her connection with contemporary music and composers grew so strong, what she loves about music that many find difficult to understand, and why the Adès concerto has become a signature of her repertoire.

Josefowicz was born near Toronto, then when she was three her family moved to the Los Angeles area (Malibu) for her father's job as a research physicist. Age three is she started playing the violin, with the Suzuki method.

"Violin was always my father's obsession," she said. It took a great deal of time and transformation, before it became hers.

"It's a strange and amazing story - a lot of parents have dreams for their children," she said. It's less common for those dreams to transform into something that the child owns - for it to become their dream. "That's actually what happened with me. I went through the trenches of the prodigy years and came out the other side."

Josefowicz studied with the Colburn School's Robert Lipsett from age eight to 13 - and that's when she not only advanced in her violin technique, but she had a quick and early introduction to Hollywood.

"He knew a lot of studio musicians and producers, people who hosted various events, gala evenings, TV shows..." Josefowicz said. As a result of his connections and of her family's location in Los Angeles - the heart of the entertainment industry - the pre-teenaged Josefowicz was invited to play in a good number of popular television shows and programs. "I was on one of Johnny Carson's last shows, and I was on the Smothers Brothers show. I was on the Mickey Mouse Club. Probably the biggest show I did was a gala event for Leonard Bernstein - I played a with Dudley Moore, and Bernstein gave me this big hug on stage."

"It was very odd," she said, but she didn't know any differently. "Only as I digested these years did I really kind of start to understand what it all meant."

In 1988, "I was part of a production that was televised internationally, called America's Tribute to Bob Hope," she said. You can see it here on YouTube - the very-young Josefowicz was introduced by Lucille Ball and performed Wieniawski's Scherzo-Tarantelle, receiving a standing ovation from an audience that included then-president Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy.

"This was a show that was seen by people around the world, including in Europe and the UK," Josefowicz said. "The head of IMG management saw it, and called their New York office and said, 'Sign her!'"

"This was very unorthodox way to start a career," she said, and it coincided with starting her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. "It was pretty odd to sign with IMG artists while just beginning at Curtis," she said.

Being a prodigy had afforded her some advantages - for example "my first full-size instrument was a Guarneri del Gesù from Bein and Fushi (the Stradivari Society)." (She now has two modern violins - both by Sam Zygmuntowicz - 2013 and 2019.)

With so many T.V. appearances as well as a recording contract under her belt already, the live performing part of her career "started relatively slowly," she said. "My main real concertizing was just beginning in those years, and really started to increase as I went through the teens.

Today, Josefowicz has three sons, ages 25, 13 and 11 - and "when I look back and see what I was doing at all these different ages, it's kind of crazy," she said. It was a lot, for someone so young. "It took many years for me to digest things," she said.

But when it came to the question of whether or not to continue in this profession, whether she could make it her own choice, "one of the big answers for me had to do with picking my own repertoire," Josefowicz said.

"I had kind of already gone through a lot of the standard rep at that point," she said, "but I was always attracted to and edging towards the more contemporary music." For example, at Curtis she played things like the Bartok Solo Sonata; and at the Marlboro Music Festival, she played the Bartok Quartet. "I studied more and more with Felix Galimir," she said. "He was very important to me." Galimir personally had known the composer Alban Berg, and "I learned a lot of Berg from him: the Lyric Suite, Violin Concerto..."

"At that time in Curtis, basically nobody was playing music this new," she said. "Times have really changed at Curtis, they're doing much more than they used to do. But this was in the early 90s. When I was there, it was old school."

Then Josefowicz had a life-changing breakthrough - she had the opportunity to work with the composer John Adams. It's a relationship that remains today.

It all started when she fell in love with Adams' Violin Concerto and wanted to perform it. No, she insisted on performing it.

"I was listening around, and Gidon Kremer had just come out with a recording of John Adams' Violin Concerto on Nonesuch," Josefowicz said. "I found it a very interesting piece, in many ways. The last movement is (Adams') quintessential sound. But the other movements I also found very interesting. And I thought, hey, let's give this a shot."

Her management, however, resisted the idea. The then-new piece already had been premiered, why perform it, if the premiere had already been done?

Josefowicz's response: "If we treated every piece this way, no piece would have a life at all!"

She got her way. They planned a performance with the Vermont Symphony, then a second performance a few months later, with the Seattle Symphony. And for the Seattle performance, the composer was in the audience.

"John came to that," she said. "We had met maybe once before, very briefly, but this time he was actually hearing me play his piece."

"I thought he liked it - I wasn't totally sure quite how much," she said. The answer came a couple of weeks later: he contacted her management and wanted to conduct a half-dozen concerts the following seasons, with her playing his Violin Concerto.

"In the life of a musician, this was about as life-changing as things could get," she said. "This was just the start of the many amazing composers that I got to meet and work with: Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, Luca Francescone, Stephen Mackey, Colin Matthews... Esa-Pekka Salonen was ready to write a violin concerto, and there I was. It was serendipitous timing, in many ways."

After spending so much time studying and performing pieces by composers from past centuries, what was it like to work with a living composer on a piece that was just written?

"It was amazing," Josefowicz said. "I was so used to just having this sense of removal...and then all of a sudden, you can go out for pizza with the composer!"

It was a time when a great many gifted and important composers were ready to jump-start a big piece, and Josefowicz was more than happy to collaborate. "I realize now, how amazing this whole 20 years has been," she said, "and this is why I also feel very lucky."

In the early 2000's Josefowicz met the composer Thomas Adès through Oliver Knussen, with whom she had been working for about five years. Adès' Violin Concerto (which originally subtitled "Concentric Paths") was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Berlin Festspiele and premiered in 2005 by violinist Anthony Marwood.

"I remember getting the manuscript score of the 'Concentric Paths' - it hadn't even quite been published yet," Josefowicz said. "It was amazing to see the score, it was just so beautiful. It wasn't written for me; it was written for a fellow colleague, Anthony Marwood. But I just fell so deeply in love with this piece, and I really wanted to learn it and play it."

Adès was becoming more and more recognized, so people wanted to hear the violin concerto.

Josefowicz first performed Adès' Violin Concerto shortly after its premiere, and by now she has given around 100 performances of it - performing it for three or four orchestra series concerts every year.

"I've been living with this piece for all of those years," she said. "It's amazing to have played this piece for basically its entire life, 20 years, solidly - almost every single season. Lots of times, and lots of different interpretations."

"Conductors, of course, are very important in this piece - or with any piece of 20th- or 21st-century music," Josefowicz said. "With the newer scores, there is a complexity with ensemble, with various rhythms, possibly with counter rhythms and all kinds of things going on." These are not the kinds of pieces one would consider conducting while playing - "the extremes of my part - and also the extremes in their parts - make it totally impossible for me to consider ever playing or conducting at once," she said. "Sometimes my part is so complicated rhythmically that I visually need to see a beat, so that I can make sure that I'm with everyone.

She doesn't memorize every modern piece she plays, but Josefowicz has memorized the Adès Violin Concerto, as it can get very complicated to toggle between looking at the score, looking at what you're doing and looking at a conductor.

"There's so much going on; it's better to have less things to look at than to have more," she said. "But you definitely need an extra person there, to help navigate."

Certainly the sound world of Adès three-movement Violin Concerto is not like any kind of traditional violin concerto. My impressions, listening to Josefowicz's new recording with the Minnesota Orchestra: the first movement "Rings" features notes on the solo violin that are on the extreme - even perhaps alarming - end of high; the second movement, "Paths," has rather menacing double-stops and gestures that get darker as the movement moves on, ending like a large beast going back to its cave. The final movement, "Rounds," begins with a kind of dark dance, with the violin line feeling melodic and soaring - at least for a time - until its starts circling into a frenzy of motion.

It's possible to conjure all kinds of images and impressions from this music. What does Josefowicz think about, when playing and interpreting this kind of piece?

"What fascinates me about these newer scores are just extraordinary sounds that can be produced and invented," Josefowicz said. "To me, it's very inspiring to always be hearing new sounds - truly new sounds." She remains in awe of the composers she works with - while they perhaps draw on some ideas from Ligeti or Stravinsky, it takes great originality and intellect to invent such completely new sound palettes.

"The composers that I work with are incredible minds, to make up these sounds," she said. Occasionally something like a story can help her form an interpretation, "but usually I go by sounds. I try to make them as powerful as possible. The score is like a map. If it's a great score, if it's clear, all you have to do is to really do it. People don't always 'really' do it, they 'sort of' do it. They 'kind of' do it. You have to 'really' do it, and make it very, very clear, what you're trying to say."

When you get a score and decide it's a beautiful score, how do you get from there to the point of "really" doing it?

"You see what's there, and you practice, you learn. It becomes part of your body. It has to become internalized," she said. "Then you see what this composer has asked, then you take it to a level that you find so convincing that no one would have any questions about it. That is what I hope to do."

"If it's a textural passage where things are really blurry, or really atmospheric, or really mysterious - you really have to give this feeling, to communicate it in whatever way that means. You have to make it real, with physicality. Otherwise, this is all up in your head."

"A real artist can take it and make it real for people," she said. "What I hope to do is to be so convincing that people are drawn in and fascinated. I hope to preempt them, before they get to this stage of, 'Do I get it?' You don't need to 'get it.' There's nothing to get. You just have to experience it."

Josefowicz loves to hear the comment "I've never heard anything like that before," from an audience member after a performance. "Then I feel like we're doing what we need to be doing in music," she said. "We're so used to things that are familiar, and we're so used to the pieces that we already know and love. But we have to stay adventurous and open."

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Interview with Violinist Leila Josefowicz: Being Open to New Music

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