Leila Josefowicz, violinist

Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in music, and who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

This is such a complicated question! I started violin so early – when I was three. It was really my father’s dream, not mine. But the choice to continue was mine. It became important to me to get my music right. So in a sense, the first answer to that question would be myself: art has to matter to you before it matters to anyone else.

Beyond that, the biggest real influence on me would be Felix Gallowmere – my teacher from the age of 13. He had known Alban Berg, and taught me Berg’s Violin Concerto.

Then, my first experience playing with a symphony orchestra as a soloist was so stimulating and exciting. There’s nothing else like it – a live performance with live musicians resonating their instruments next to you is a very different sensation from listening to a recording.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

My personality today is partly the result of the struggles that came with success so young. My family dynamic gravitated around my violin playing, which put a lot of pressure on me.

Sometimes I questioned whether the violin was a healthy thing for me to be pursuing. But I have now concluded that it is actually my salvation as well. Without the violin, I would be without a skeleton, a body without bones. So I must celebrate this to its utmost and make really the most of what I can do with this instrument.

Which performances or recordings are you most proud of?

The recordings I’m most proud of are definitely those pieces that were written specially for me and with composers or conductors who mean the most to me. These are the works that I shaped with their creators. The obvious one that comes to my mind is Oliver Knussen’s violin concerto.

The personal experiences that accompany this process are so meaningful: getting to know the composers, understanding how their minds work, and then applying different aspects of myself to the interpretation.

What particular works or composers do you think you perform best?

The richness of my past experiences go hand in hand with my performances, and in turn this influences my future commissions. So even if I don’t know a certain composer as well as I knew John Adams or Oliver Knussen, I can apply the same experience of the love of a piece, of the way

I feel a piece, of the way I look at a piece, to the new work. It’s a richness that builds on itself in a wonderful way. The ability to look at the core of what I consider to be this composer’s sound, or what they’re aiming for, is something that I gives me huge enjoyment.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

Most of what I’m doing this season was all thought through at least one or two years ago. So there is much evolution of time and consideration involved in the resulting performances. Of course, you can still always be surprised by an artistic turn in somebody’s music, but there’s usually a particularly intriguing sonority or rhythm that they create, a certain feeling or sound that they’re going for, and that pulls me towards it.

What do you do off-stage that provides inspiration on stage?

My life is quite hermetic. My dedication is to the obvious, the most important things in my life – my music and my children. Sometimes I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but luckily, in my case, my children are pretty happy individuals and want to show me that they can do things sometimes without my help. There are always feelings in a performance: this could have gone better. And of course, you get exactly that same feeling as a mother every day. So these things that you commit your life to – children and music – are in a constant process of searching, refining, reassessing and reworking. It’s never done or final. It’s an exploration.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

I can’t separate these two questions of which concert venue and which piece? I love the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, especially for newer music. The Berlin Philharmonie is wonderful, with a great space of reverberation as well as great clarity. The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is wonderful. but sometimes it’s too ‘swimmy’ for newer music. Same with the Musikverein. These are stunning halls, so I can’t criticise them.

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?

Music has to be accessible to people, embedded into our culture. We need to be heard by non music-lovers – those people who are open-minded but don’t realise what they’re missing. How to achieve this is an interesting question. I think the Aldeburgh Festival does manage to answer this – you have different activities in different places, with different kinds of programmes. If every city in the world had this kind of setup of ideas and people, it would be a completely different story.

This interview first appeared in the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival brochure

Artist image: Tom Zimberoff