An interview with Jack Liebeck

Tell us about your reasons for doing this album.

I’m coming up to 40 and I’ve started to think about where my musical heritage comes from, something I’ve not thought about before. I come from an immigrant family – I’m a first-generation

Brit – and my grandfather was a very good amateur violinist, but he died before I started playing. He fled the Nazis in 1934 to go to South Africa and his favourite concerto was Brahms’s Violin Concerto. It’s a piece I’ve always adored, wanted to play and wanted to record.

Why did you couple it with the Schoenberg Concerto?

I started looking for pieces that would complement my grandfather’s story; the obvious choice was Korngold, but everyone’s done that. I realised that Schoenberg wrote his Violin Concerto a few years after fleeing the Nazis in 1933, a year before my grandfather. I’m pretty sure my grandfather wouldn’t have liked the piece, because he was quite a Romantic, but I’m trying to sell it to him.

Is it a challenging work to navigate?

My usual feeling when I hear something that seems a bit unusual is ‘what can I do with this… what can the idea behind the performance be?’ and I do like a challenge. It is famously unplayable, according to Jascha Heifetz, who said you need a sixth finger. I think there is a lot of lyricism in it; you just have to be really careful not to hack away at some of the chords. My version is about two minutes slower than a lot of other versions as well, so I feel it in a bit more of a laid-back way than some people.