The New York Times reflects on 75 years of Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak Perlman celebrates his 75th birthday this month (Photo Credit: Yael Malka for The New York Times)
Itzhak Perlman, Violin Legend, Still Proves the Critics Wrong
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The New York Times
August 26, 2020
Itzhak Perlman is a superstar in classical music. And not just there: No other violinist enjoys his level of recognition among people who don’t even go to traditional concerts.
Many have seen him on Sesame Street, or at Madison Square Garden appearing alongside Billy Joel. They might have heard him speaking about disability issues, informed by the childhood bout of polio that took away the use of his legs. They might have teared up listening to the theme from Schindler’s List, which Mr. Perlman infused with ineffable melancholy.
Mr. Perlman has been so ubiquitous that it is easy to take for granted his status as “the reigning virtuoso of the violin,” as his marketing materials put it. But with his 75th birthday arriving on August 31, this may be a moment to reassess how that reign began and what has happened to the realm and all the superlatives. For some guidance, there is a new box set from Sony of 18 CDs, from a 1967 Prokofiev album with Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra to the klezmer tribute Eternal Echoes, from 2012.
Like many, I had come to know Mr. Perlman through his recordings. By the time I was in my teens in the 1980s and becoming serious about studying the violin, virtually every album of fiddle music I owned featured him. The Solo Sonatas and Partitas of Bach, in which his sustained, radiant sound seemed to draw ribbons of light in the dark. The concertos of Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, in which his violin cut jubilantly through the orchestral forest in even the most acrobatic passages. His Bruch simmered. His Mozart was flirtatious and sunny. He was a universal entry point to classical music.
Mr. Perlman was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 and fell in love with the violin when he first heard it on the radio at three. A year later, he contracted polio, but after recovering showed a remarkable musical talent. A significant break came in 1958, when he was invited to play Mendelssohn on The Ed Sullivan Show. Soon after that, he moved to New York to study with the famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School.
On that 1967 debut recording, with Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony, he played Prokofiev’s Second Concerto. Appropriately, the first notes are Mr. Perlman’s alone, and his sound in that ruminating statement is soulful and knowing. Elsewhere, in passages of agitated difficulty, the bravura and bite of the young violinist’s technique are evident. But it is the heat and depth of tone that announced, from the beginning, an artist of uncommon magnetism.
Mr. Perlman rose to fame as an earlier cohort of star violinists — Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin — faded from view. With his glamorous tone and dazzling technical skills, he was their natural heir.
More collaborations with Leinsdorf followed, and with the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, who would become a preferred chamber music partner for years. By the 1980s, Mr. Perlman was the standard — and some degree of standardization seemed part of the package. His facility with acrobatic bowing techniques made him one of the most persuasive champions of 19th-century showpieces, like the Paganini caprices or Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy. And his signature tone resulted in definitive renditions of war horses of the concerto repertory.
Glossy, voluminous and cleanly contoured across the range, his sound was uncommonly reliable, reproducible and brightly projected. It aligned perfectly with the high-fidelity technology that was changing both the way people listened to music at home and what they expected to hear in live concerts.
And onscreen: Mr. Perlman proved a natural communicator on television, advocating for music and disability rights with a winning combination of self-deprecating charm and self-assurance. In 1993, it was his violin that deepened the pathos of the Schindler’s List theme, which for a vast swath of listeners remains his signature tune.
In 1994, Mr. Perlman formalized his increasing devotion to education. His wife, the violinist Toby Perlman, founded the Perlman Music Program, through which both continue to nurture gifted teenage string players.
Mr. Perlman’s playing is still far from wrinkled. While his Vivaldi now bears the sepia tint of another era, he has been in business long enough to have seen fashions come and go. And it is strategic for him to make his late-career concerts a bit more about him and a bit less about Vivaldi. The sheer brilliance of his sound goes a long way in disarming scholarly scruples and critical quibbles. And whether or not they subscribe to every detail of his style, aspiring soloists would do well to study an art of which he is indeed perhaps the reigning virtuoso: engaging an audience, and playing it both for pathos and laughs.
To read the full article, click here.