I first learned about Leila Josefowicz eight years ago, shortly before she won her MacArthur award, and because I was working on Shostakovich at the time, I acquired her recording of his notoriously difficult Violin Concerto No. 1. It was a knockout, and I resolved from then on to keep my eye (and ear) on her. More recently, I saw her do the complicated first-violin role in Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, with Fred Sherry on the cello and two other great players on the viola and second violin. This too was an eye-opener. But not until I heard her in a whole program of her own devising, last Tuesday night at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, did I fully realize what a tremendously accomplished musician she is.
The program, which paired Josefowicz with the pianist John Novacek, began with Manuel de Falla’s showy Suite populaire espagnole, which let her strut her fast-fingering stuff in a folksy, romantic mode. Well done, but hardly the kind of composition that would have drawn the avid music audience who had come to hear her that night. She satisfied the more modernist contingent with the next piece, Olivier Messaien’s Theme and Variations, which allowed her to convey a more stringent, harsh, rigorous world of sound. But it was only when she and Novacek entered onto the third work of the evening, Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1, that their partnership became profound. This is to Schumann’s credit, of course, as well as to theirs: he knew how to make the voices of the two instruments meld fully together. But he was extraordinarily well-served by this particular violinist and pianist in tandem, because they both understood how his work defined that strange nineteenth-century moment when music was at once fixed in a tradition and potentially open to change.
The period after the intermission was entirely late-twentieth-century, featuring two composers that are still very much alive. Josefowicz ended with John Adams’s Road Movies, a thrilling piece that premiered in 1995 and that I could listen to a thousand times. But in part because I have listened to it a thousand times (one San Francisco friend has playing it on his household soundtrack practically every time I come over), I was more moved and impressed by the other work on the program, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Conversio. This too dates from the 1990s, but no one in the audience, to my knowledge, had ever heard it before (last Tuesday was its Carnegie Hall premiere), and we went wild with enthusiasm for it. The music draws from a range of modernist strategies—harsh shrieking, low thrumming, antic pizzicato, intensely propulsive chords, and above all suspenseful pauses—but it sounds like nothing else I have ever encountered, and it made me want to hear more of this Estonian composer’s work. It also displayed to the fullest Josefowicz’s intelligent musicality: she understood exactly the ways in which it was connected to both the Messiaen and the Adams (and even the Schumann, in terms of emotional register), but she also understood that this twelve-minute composition was triumphantly a thing-in-itself, a fitting pinnacle to the program she had so beautifully designed and presented.