Many who would never dream of attending a violin recital have warmed to Itzhak Perlman. Voluble, funny, and charismatic, he has traded quips with David Letterman and appeared on Sesame Street. He has garnered Grammys and Emmys with boring regularity, and a Newsweek cover story named him ” Top Fiddle.” Last year, he was the TV color man for that apotheosis of classical-music popularization, a Three Tenors concert at Dodger Stadium. Left unable to walk by childhood polio, he has long been a spokesman for the disabled.
Fame is nothing new to him. Perlman was appearing before the public at an age when most boys are chuckling at comic books. Born in Tel Aviv, he emigrated with his parents to New York when he was 13. That same year, he was on The Ed Sullivan Show, chubby and grinning, ripping through The Flight of the Bumblebee. He soon developed the sound that set him apart — big, lush, confident, and adaptable, as recognizable as a family member’s voice. It can bend to all types of music, from the Baroque through the Classical and Romantic to the contemporary. It stands in dramatic contrast to today’s influential “original instruments” movement, which advocates the use of period instruments and the adoption of older notions about sound — such as that it ought to be thin and vibrato-less. (Perlman has little patience for it: “I turn on the radio these days,” he says, “and all I hear is scratch- scratch and hoot-hoot.”)
The violinist, now 51, is accused by some of coasting. But there was little evidence of that at a recent Washington recital with his longtime accompanist, the pianist Samuel Sanders. He began with the Fantasy Pieces of Schumann, a good choice: Perlman is an effective Romanticist because he has the discipline to rein in the emotions and let the composer have his say.
He followed with the Brahms G-major sonata, one of the loveliest works in the repertory. It has a sublime, ethereal opening that is often butchered. Perlman, however, entered as though picking up a thread of sound already begun. The slow movement, in particular, showcased Perlman’s exceptional phrasing — his ability to reproduce musical sentences with their correct punctuation and awareness of the whole. He has a refined sense of loud and soft and all the gradations in between. There were some technical glitches along the way, but musicianship won out, as it always does against a missed note or two.
Perlman has some sixty-five recordings available at the moment. One of the more recent is The American Album, which features music of Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Lukas Foss. Perlman is in excellent form in these angular, often beautiful compositions, and he is ably partnered by the not- always-dependable Boston Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Seiji Ozawa.
Perlman’s klezmer album, In the Fiddler’s House, is a “crossover” effort. But what Perlman has crossed over to is, as he says, “in my blood.” Klezmer music comes from Eastern Europe’s Jews and is performed on a variety of occasions, most of them gay. The music has the strange capacity to be melancholy and merry at the same time, as though taunting and defying unnamed miseries. In it, Perlman’s violin dances, wails, swoons, and snickers. Classical musicians — singers in particular — have always honored, and classed up, the folk music closest to their hearts, and Perlman does his bit with panache.
Those with a few hundred to spare may wish to purchase EMI’s 21-disc Itzhak Perlman Collection, there for the judgment of posterity. But if it were possible to have only one disc, it should probably be Perlman’s recording of the Beethoven violin concerto — one of the noblest statements of that composer — with the conductor Gian Carlo Giulini. Every violinist must submit to the challenge of this work — a spiritual challenge more than anything else — and how the player handles it reveals much about him.
Every now and then there comes a classical musician who enters the popular imagination: Caruso the tenor, Toscanini the conductor, Horowitz the pianist. And for a long while — some fifty years in the middle of this century — it was Heifetz the violinist. Isaac Stern once said of Heifetz, “He was the sound in every player’s ear as we were growing up.” Now it is Itzhak Perlman who is the carrier of that sound. The world thinks of Perlman as the greatest violinist alive, and treats him accordingly.
By a happy accident, he is, and it should.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
