A serious case of the violin

English violin soloist Jack Liebeck will perform Dvorak's Violin Concerto with the Southern Sinfonia on Saturday. Photo supplied.

Learning the violin was a life-changing experience for the young Jack Liebeck.

"Everyone has a certain thing that can make them tick and that was certainly my one," the English violinist said in a telephone interview from Auckland on Monday. He will be playing with the Auckland Philharmonia tonight and coming to Dunedin tomorrow to perform Dvorak's Violin Concerto in the Southern Sinfonia's concert on Saturday.

When he was 7, he spent a year nagging his parents to let him learn the violin. He'd been singing and playing the recorder and other instruments, and his parents thought the violin would be another passing phase.

"Because I kept going on about the violin, they took me to the Saturday morning music school and said 'Can you find him a violin teacher because he's really annoying us now'," he says with a laugh.

But he took to the violin like a duck to water.

"I immediately thought 'I can do this'. I had an intuitive understanding of how it works. I still feel that. If I have to sit in front of the piano, it's like I can play a few notes but my brain isn't programmed to do it naturally."

After a couple of weeks, his violin teacher told his parents they had a violinist on their hands and nothing was going to be the same again, he says.

"He recognised immediately there was something there and within six months I'd auditioned for the Purcell School of Music, which is a full-time music school, and I was there within a year. It was really good for me because I'd not really got on well at school before that. It helped me in many ways, not just in terms of music. Once I found it, everything improved in my schoolwork. It just channelled my brain in the right way. It really did change my life."

Now, in his early 30s, he's a big advocate of teaching children music and other arts at school, and not limiting school work to reading, writing and arithmetic. If you learn something subtle like music, it improves all those other things as well, and it's not just banging your head against a book, he says.

In Saturday's concert, he will play Dvorak's Violin Concerto, one of his favourites but a work that is not often played.

"It's puzzling. I don't understand why. The Dvorak violin concerto is seen as a very difficult piece in terms of pulling it off. It's a wonderful piece for the audience and they love it, but it's quite a tricky piece and requires a lot of stamina.

"I think of it as like a folky version of Brahms' violin concerto. It's on a large scale and dramatic but has more folky tunes in it. It's a wonderful violin concerto. I've recorded it and tried to do my best for it."

The fact that people don't play pieces often is no reflection on the pieces themselves, he says.

"It's just there's a lot of fashion involved in what pieces have become popular over the years."

He finds it odd that we only consider a handful of composers from any particular period worth performing when there were hundreds of others at the time. He enjoys performing such less common works.

Playing a concerto with an orchestra is different from the intimacy of playing a recital with one or two other musicians, he says.

"That's like a dance, two people moving musically, communicating without any language whatsoever. You start to breathe together and understand what the other is doing musically in a very intimate way."

Concertos are on a larger scale, one person interacting with a whole orchestra, he says.

"Playing a concerto is tremendously powerful. It's drama, the size of the orchestra - you have to make a lot of sound and be very demonstrative with what you are doing, but with recitals you can almost go in the opposite direction completely and be playing with tiny gestures."

Recently, he's been recording a soundtrack by Dario Marienelli for the film Anna Karenina, which will be released in November. It is the second film soundtrack by the Italian composer for which he has been soloist, having recorded one for Jane Eyre last year.

Besides teaching at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Liebeck performs around the world.

"It's an amazing thing to fly across the world and take your violin out and start making music with people you haven't met before," he says.

He is married to another violinist, Victoria Sayles, and they have a dog, Molly, which he misses while he's on tour. Sayles will join him on his tour of New Zealand for Chamber Music New Zealand next year.

"It's a difficult thing with a musician's lifestyle. When you talk to other musician couples, we talk about diary days, when you sit down with a diary and work out when you are going to see each other over the next few months," he says.

"I do like the travelling, but it's also important to be at home as much as possible, and have some semblance of home life."

Hear him
The Southern Sinfonia, conducted by Brett Kelly, gives a concert in the Regent Theatre on Saturday, July 21, at 8pm. They will perform Sibelius' Finlandia, Elgar's Enigma Variations, and Dvorak's Violin Concerto with soloist Jack Liebeck.