The Strad Recommends: Leila Josefowicz: Adès

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: March 2026

Description: A mesmerising new account of a recent violin concerto

Musicians: Leila Josefowicz (violin) Minnesota Orchestra/Thomas Søndergård

Works: Adès: Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’; ’The Exterminating Angel’ Symphony

Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC5187487

For a piece premiered as recently as 2005, Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto Concentric Paths has already accumulated quite a number of high-profile recordings, with accounts from Augustin Hadelich, Pekka Kuusisto, Peter Herresthal and Anthony Marwood (for whom Adès wrote the piece) among them. If US violinist Leila Josefowicz is stepping into quite a crowded field, she nonetheless stamps a very distinctive mark on Adès’s mesmerising mix of cool-headed structuralism and emotional exuberance.

She has played the piece live for many years, as she explains in her brief booklet note, and that’s immediately apparent in her deep understanding of the concerto’s restlessly shifting moods and textures, and in the eloquent way she adapts her playing in response. She’s crisp and crystal clear in the cascading arpeggios that open the first movement, shifting into breathless athleticism later in the movement, but always with a clear intent. She conjures a strange beauty amid the second movement’s slithering figurations, too, and zips along with almost manic energy in the finale. It’s a thoroughly compelling account that digs deep to uncover the meanings – emotional and intellectual – that seem to lie behind Adès’s sometimes complex writing.

Josefowicz receives enormously characterful support from the Minnesota Orchestra under Thomas Søndergård, who generates some exceptionally beautiful passages but is unafraid to make his band roar and grumble too. The Exterminating Angel Symphony – extracted from Adès’s third opera and getting its first ever recording – likewise shows off both the orchestra’s and the recording’s teeming detail, and Søndergård has an exceptional sense of the piece’s unfolding drama. It’s a thoroughly rewarding disc – even if, at a mere 39 minutes, it’s more than a little short.

DAVID KETTLE