There are three things that violinist Jack Liebeck is looking forward to most of all when he performs in Cape Town on November 1 and 13 November, 2025. His return to the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra with City Hall’s warm audience, his recital Cape Town Concert Series platform and the thoughts of his close family ties to Cape Town, in particular his grandfather when he plays in the City Hall.
When he last performed with the CPO in the Bruch Violin Concerto in 2016 he felt the spirit of his grandfather with him.
A radio orchestra
“My grandfather was studying law when he fled Germany for Cape Town in 1934. He put law to the side and became an insurance salesman, but was also a good violinist. In Cape Town he was a member of a radio orchestra for Caltex Cascinados and regularly played chamber music with members of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. He also insured many of the CTSO instruments in his role as insurance broker! He died in 1987 but I really felt his presence when I performed on that Town Hall stage, it was very moving. I am hoping he will return with me when I perform this time.”
Jack, whose parents are the son and daughter of German and Dutch Jewish emigrees who had fled to Cape Town, leaving the horrors of Europe in the 1930, was born in London after his parents left in the 1970s but feels an affinity to this country.
His aunt and uncle, friends of the late CPO chairman, Ben Rabinowitz, still visit annually.
He always knew he wanted to be a violinist – at the age of seven he started badgering his parents to learn the violin, they finally gave in a year later and found him a teacher who gave him “incredible grounding and musical education.”
For him it was a life changing experience, for he says playing the violin was the only thing he was good at!
Mateja Marinkovic
“My teacher, Mateja Marinkovic, remained my teacher for the whole of my student life (aged 8 to 23), and I think it is his influence that stays with me when I teach my students at the Royal Academy of Music where I am the first professor to hold the Émile Sauret Professor of Violin chair and I teach roughly two days a week around my concert schedule. So when I was asked if I could give masterclasses to the violinists of the CP Youth Orchestra I jumped at it. I love teaching!“
Good thing he does because he has to ensure that when he travels his students get all their lessons before he leaves or after he comes back.
“I travel a fair amount through the year giving concerts in the UK, USA, Australia and Europe and this trip to South Africa is quite long because I also have concerts with the Johannesburg Philharmonic on October 30 and the KZNPO on November 6, so I have many lessons to make up before I leave.”
Great pieces of the violin
The pieces – “two of the great pieces of the violin repertoire” – that he is performing with CPO and KZNPO, are Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saëns “a stunningly gorgeous showpiece” and after that The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams, “which is a real crowd pleaser, perhaps the work for violin performed most often in the UK where audiences love it. It’s a wonderful piece to hear live.”
Chamber music nut
Jack is a chamber music nut and looks forward to his Concert Series recital with Megan Geoffrey Prins, too. The pair will perform Brahms Sonatas Nos 1, 2, and 3.
He is artistic director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music and confesses that chamber music may be his favourite.
“For me there is no difference between chamber music and solo concertos except for the number of players. It’s simply a dialogue. With an orchestra I am just playing in a large chamber group.”
He is also a mad car nut, likes to travel, ski and spend time with his dog Mollie (a snow white Lurcher), who is his passion but he has little enough time for her because his main passion, music, takes up every minute of his life. Hopefully in Cape Town he will be able to indulge in another love – fitness– and looks forward to investigating the Company Gardens.
Leonard Slatkin, Vasily Petrenko, Daniel Harding
Jack considers himself very lucky to have had his musical life, having performed internationally and recorded with many major international orchestras and with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, Vasily Petrenko and Daniel Harding.
“The most important thing is to appreciate the people who play with you and that they must enjoy working with you. Musicians are lucky because unlike athletes who are given a limited time span before their bodies give out, us musicians can perform for many decades. We are so connected through the generations – I have played with people who played with Messiaen, who himself will have played with other legends going back perhaps 100 or more years! Then there is knowledge that I have been playing the Bruch concerto for thirty years which is about 20 percent of that piece’s lifetime, another long term connection into the past. The world is not as simple as it used to be – there is less funding for the arts, plus social-media and other media platforms are constantly competing for attention, but we must continue to have the ability to keep on making beautiful music.
“Music evolves with us, and as I get older and teach what I learned as a kid I realise how I have evolved over the years as I live with pieces of music through my lifetime.”
Jack – and his 2022 Melvin Goldsmith violin (a homage to the ‘Ex-Wilhelm’ JB Guadagnini 1785 violin that he played for almost 27 years) – fly back the same night as his CPO concert to give a chamber music concert the next day in London and the day after a recital in Mannheim, Germany. Then he goes back to London to “lick his wounds and go back to teaching for a week or so!”
Who: Violinist Jack Liebeck with Cape Town Concert Series and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra (Arjan Tien on the podium)
Where: Baxter Theatre Centre/ Cape Town City Hall
When: 1 (Concert Series) and 13 November with the CPO at 19:30; pre -concert talk 18:45 and the dress rehearsal at 11am.
Concert tickets: Concert Series, CPO; Dress rehearsal tickets
WS
