Jack Liebeck

Violinist Jack Liebeck has gained increasing visibility on the British circuit through a blend of stage presence and firm technical command, appearing both on high-profile film soundtracks and in standard repertory works.

Born in London on August 4, 1980, Liebeck first drew notice at age ten when he portrayed the young Mozart for a BBC television broadcast. He studied at the Purcell School of Music before entering the Royal Academy of Music, where Mateja Marinkovic served as his principal instructor, and he completed his training there in 2003. That same promise surfaced publicly when his 2002 Wigmore Hall recital debut sold out and drew unusually strong reviews. Liebeck had launched his recording activity the previous year with a violin-and-piano recital alongside Katya Apekisheva on Quartz; the release received a Classical Brit Award nomination, and his subsequent Sony Classical album of Dvořák earned the award itself. Those successes led to solo engagements with leading British orchestras as well as ensembles across Europe and the United States, among them the St. Louis and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestras. An active chamber musician as well, Liebeck has collaborated with pianists such as Angela Hewitt, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Piers Lane, and in 2013 he became a member of the Paris-based Trio Dali.

Two of his most widely heard contributions came as violin soloist on the soundtracks for Jane Eyre (2011) and Anna Karenina (2012), both scored by Dario Marianelli. He has also performed Marianelli’s concert piece the Voyager Violin Concerto, presenting it in joint lecture-recital formats with a physics professor. Returning to the studio with Apekisheva, Liebeck issued a collection of Fritz Kreisler’s music on Hyperion in 2014. He continued with that label through the middle of the decade, issuing a series of well-received discs devoted to Max Bruch that brought renewed attention to several rarely heard scores beyond the frequently programmed Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26. A 2017 volume in the series offered a persuasive account of the Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 44. In 2020 Liebeck moved to Orchid Classics for a recording of the Schoenberg and Brahms violin concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Gourlay; that year he also appeared on Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs, Vol. 1. The following year he released Ysaÿe on Orchid Classics, a survey of the composer’s demanding violin works. He joined the London Chamber Orchestra for two further projects: Music from the Ghetto (2023, Signum Classics) and Vaughan Williams: Retrospect (2024, Orchid Classics).