Leila Josefowicz

Leila Josefowicz's virtuosic violin is equally at home with the classical and Romantic greats of the past as well as composers working in similar styles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her adaptability among generations has earned her a lengthy tenure performing with acclaimed orchestras around the world as well as a prolific recorded discography. Josefowicz was born in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada in 1977 and moved to Los Angeles as a child with her parents. Though her mother and father were both scientists by trade, they not only indulged but shared in their daughter’s budding passion for music: all three started playing violin through the Suzuki method when Leila was only three. By age five, she was taking formal lessons, which continued after the family moved to Philadelphia when Leila was a teenager. After studying at the Curtis Institute of Music, she completed her bachelor’s in music the same year she graduated from the Julia R. Masterman School, Philadelphia’s top-ranked high school and one of the top 10 in America. Leila's rise as a professional musician was meteoric: having already performed with major orchestras across several continents in her teens, she debuted on the Carnegie Hall stage in 1994 with Sir Neville Marriner and The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields with a stirring performance of Tchaikovsky's sole violin concerto. She and the orchestra would record Tchaikovsky and Sibelius' concertos for her Philips debut a year later. More celebrated albums followed, including 1996’s Solo (featuring works by Bartók, Paganini and Ysaÿe), 1997’s Violin for Anne Rice (a collection of classical and contemporary pieces inspired by the Interview with the Vampire writer’s novel Violin), 1998’s For the End of Time (a team-up with pianist John Novacek offering reads on Grieg and Messiaen) and 2000’s Americana (reuniting with Novacek on great works by Stephen Foster, George Gershwin and Scott Joplin). Orchestral recordings from the period include a reunion with Marriner and the ASMF (1997’s Bohemian Rhapsodies) and collaborations with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, performing concertos by Felix Mendelssohn and Sergei Prokofiev between 1999 and 2001. Josefowicz's recording output lessened in the mid-’00s, though she was hardly inactive, turning instead to performances of works by still-living composers. She’d debut works by John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès and others - a contribution to contemporary music that earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. In the 2010s, she began to commit some of these works to record for the Deutsche Grammophon label and elsewhere, including Salonen's Grammy-nominated Violin Concerto (2012), Adams' The Dharma At Big Sur (2010), the Grammy-nominated Scherezade.2 (2016) and Violin Concerto (2018), and Adès’ The Exterminating Angel Symphony & Violin Concerto (2025). ~ Mike Duquette