🇨🇦🇺🇸 Leila Josefowicz

The Philadelphia Orchestra's management had seen its share of prodigies. The orchestra was Sarah Chang's launching pad, the ensemble where Zubin Mehta had called a child "the most electrifying musician" he had ever seen. When a twelve-year-old named Leila Josefowicz auditioned in the late 1980s, then, the bar for astonishment was high. She cleared it. The debut followed, and Josefowicz stepped onto one of the world's great stages as a child and played as if she already owned it. Decades later, what that moment began — a career of extraordinary range, intellectual daring, and tireless advocacy for new music — would prove to be one of the most distinctive in the history of her instrument.

Leila Bronia Josefowicz was born on October 20, 1977, in Meadowvale, Ontario, Canada, to a family with roots in both Canada and the United States. She began playing violin at four, progressing through conservatory training with the speed that marks children whose gifts are genuine rather than constructed. She eventually enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — the same institution that shaped Hilary Hahn, the same rarefied community of young musicians who compete fiercely for the dozen-odd places available in the violin studio each year. At Curtis she studied with Jaime Laredo, a Bolivian-American violinist of the old school who understood both the classical repertoire and the demands of a solo career.

The Philadelphia Orchestra debut at twelve established her publicly. EMI Classics signed her; a recording career built around the standard concerto repertoire followed. Her Beethoven, her Brahms, her Mendelssohn were recorded when she was still in her teens and released to critical admiration. But what distinguished Josefowicz from her talented contemporaries was not the quality of her readings of the nineteenth-century canon — though those readings were superb — but what she chose to do with the capital of a major recording career once she had it. She turned toward new music.

The turn began in earnest in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Josefowicz began commissioning, premiering, and championing concertos by living composers — not as a sideline or a public relations exercise but as the central project of her artistic life. John Adams was among the first and most important. Adams had written a violin concerto in 1993 that had not yet found its definitive interpreter; Josefowicz took up the work, performed it more than a hundred times, and recorded it in what became the benchmark version — the recording that defined how this concerto is heard and understood. Adams, in turn, wrote Scheherazade.2 for her, premiering it with the New York Philharmonic in 2015. The work was Adams's response to the global refugee crisis and the treatment of women, framed as a dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra, and Josefowicz's advocacy for it has been as much poetic as technical.

Other composers followed. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Colin Matthews, Luca Francesconi, Matthias Pintscher, Bernd Alois Zimmermann — more than twenty composers have written major works for Josefowicz, many of them premiering their pieces in her hands. The cumulative effect of this advocacy work is a body of new repertoire that would not exist without her, a contribution to the art form that operates at the level of composition rather than merely performance. She has not just played music; she has brought it into existence. The Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance in 1999, for her recording of John Adams's music, confirmed that the classical establishment recognized what she was doing.

The Avery Fisher Prize in 2018 — one of the most prestigious awards in American classical music, given to instrumentalists for outstanding achievement and excellence in performance — was the summation of a career that by then had spanned three decades. Josefowicz received it not simply as a prodigy who had grown up well, but as an artist who had reshaped the landscape of what violin playing in the twenty-first century could mean. The child who debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra at twelve had become the musician who determined what music the next generation of orchestras would play.