Meet the Intrepid Violinist Who Just Won $100,000

NEW YORK — When violinist Leila Josefowicz was given the $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize on Thursday evening, she was at David Geffen Hall with the New York Philharmonic performing Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D — which counts almost as early music for her.

Josefowicz is one of classical music’s great champions of the new, and has introduced works by many of today’s leading composers — including John Adams, who wrote “Scheherazade.2,” a dramatic portrait of a woman confronting oppression, for her in 2015.

In an interview, Josefowicz, 40, said she grew enamored of new music at a crucial turning point: as she was making the transition from child prodigy to mature artist. She had performed with an orchestra by age 8, gotten professional management by 13 and appeared on television with Johnny Carson, and in a Bob Hope special, while still a child.

“I think that my desire to play new music and perform new music, and learn new scores, was in many ways a result of having to reinvent myself for myself — so that I was happy playing the violin and making music,” she said. “And also feeling like I wanted to make a contribution to this art form by commissioning and performing new works.”

She has now done that, repeatedly. In addition to Adams, she has championed composers including Colin Matthews, Steven Mackey, Luca Francesconi and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who wrote his Violin Concerto for her.

Adams said he was captivated by her playing, and by her ability to absorb the most difficult new works. “It’s an incredible combination of emotional intensity and just supreme technical virtuosity,” he said, “and some extra level of charisma, a kind of electricity onstage.”

Winning the prestigious Fisher prize also earns Josefowicz a place on a plaque in Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall) alongside past recipients including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and violinists Midori and Joshua Bell.

Josefowicz noted that the award came during a time in which she had lost two formative figures in her career: British composer Oliver Knussen, whose work she played frequently and who she said had been “very much responsible for carving out my new path with 20th- and 21st-century music”; and her early manager, Charles Hamlen, who she said had protected her as a young musician, often urging patience. “He said I had time,” she recalled.

She is already planning to perform more new works, “to invite audiences to not listen with familiarity, to have them listen with curiosity, with a sense of adventure, with a sense of spontaneity.”

“Familiarity has been like a heavy X-ray blanket that’s covered most of the way people listen to music,” she said. “Even people who love music don’t perhaps know this incredible world that’s in front of them, that all we need to do is perform for them.”