In 2008, when the MacArthur Foundation awarded Leila Josefowicz a prestigious (and elusive) MacArthur Fellowship—famously nicknamed the “genius grant”—the organization noted that she was renowned for “broadening the [violin]’s repertoire and captivating audiences through her juxtaposition of the avant-garde and eclectic with the more traditional” as well as for “stretching the mold of the classical violinist in her passionate advocacy of contemporary composers and their work.”
The Canadian-born Josefowicz has been both “captivating audiences” and “stretching the mold” for almost her entire life.
Josefowicz began playing the violin at the age of three, and it was only a few years later, after her family moved to the Los Angeles area, that she made a major mark at the national level: In January of 1988, when she was 10 years old, Josefowicz performed on a televised tribute to Bob Hope—a star-studded event that also marked the opening of the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, California. Josefowicz was warmly introduced by none other than Lucille Ball, and, following her jaw-dropping performance of Wieniawski’s hair-raising Scherzo-Tarantelle, the musical prodigy received a standing ovation from the enraptured audience, which, in addition to Hope, included the President and First Lady at the time, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, among many other high-profile attendees.
Soon after that stunning performance, Josefowicz and her family moved to Philadelphia, where, at the age of 13, Josefowicz began studying at the Curtis Institute while also attending high school. By the time she was 18, Josefowicz had earned both her high school diploma and bachelor’s degree (in the same year), and she was fully immersed in building a world-class career that had already seen her make her Carnegie Hall debut (at the age of 16) and perform with such ensembles as the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras, to name just a few.
Over the past three decades, Josefowicz has received numerous honors—including an Avery Fisher Career Grant, an Avery Fisher Prize, and two Grammy nominations—and she’s performed with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors and given recitals in the world’s most prestigious venues. But, as the MacArthur Foundation pointed out, she’s made a particular name for herself by premiering and championing the works of living composers. In a 2017 interview with The Strad, Josefowicz said: “I think my obsession with new music goes back to very early in my career. Felix Galimir, who was one of my teachers at the Curtis Institute, gave the first performance of Berg’s Lyric Suite, and it was incredible to have a tangible link to that kind of history. But [I was in] an environment where even composers like Bartók were considered very modern indeed, which only made me more excited to challenge the idea of the ‘standard repertoire’ once I had the freedom to do so later on.”
Josefowicz did get that freedom later on, and in a 2019 interview, she noted that she’s drawn to both “the daring of playing something that audiences don’t know” and to the “spontaneity in performing something for which people can’t rely on comparative listening”—a potentially fruitful scenario that, creatively, she finds “refreshing.”
At the Festival this summer, you can see Josefowicz in action as she and cellist Paul Watkins (who was a member of the recently retired Emerson String Quartet) open the Tuesday, July 15, concert with the New Mexico premiere of a piece the Festival co-commissioned from Sean Shepherd, whom The New York Times has hailed as “an exciting composer of the new American generation.” (Josefowicz and Watkins give the piece, called Latticework, its world premiere earlier in the summer.)
On that same July 15 program, Josefowicz and Watkins also play Ravel’s animated and highly demanding Sonata for Violin and Cello, which Ravel wrote as a tribute to Debussy, and earlier in the week, on the season-opening concerts of Sunday, July 13, and Monday, July 14, Josefowicz and Watkins join pianist Gilles Vonsattel for Shostakovich’s somber yet sublime Piano Trio in E Minor.