Perlman was born in Tel Aviv in 1945; his parents, from Poland, each fled the rising tide of Nazism in the mid 1930s, then met and married in Palestine. He began his training at the city’s Academy of Music as a small child; aged 13 he went to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music with two of the world’s most important violin professors, Dorothy DeLay and Ivan Galamian. A TV performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1958 brought him wide attention; and after a Carnegie Hall debut in 1963 followed by first prize at the Leventritt Competition, the stage was set.
Watching that early TV film (extracted in Alison Chernick’s documentary, Itzhak), it is fascinating to hear that the teenaged Perlman’s violin tone was essentially the same as it is today. Instantly recognisable, it has an exceptional sweetness, a distinctively expressive way of phrasing, and a lavish, consistent vibrato.
“For me sound is actually two words: sound and tone,” Perlman says. “I think you can teach someone how to make a good sound, but you cannot teach the beauty and character of the tone. When I was growing up, the great violinists — Kreisler, Heifetz, Milstein, Oistrakh, Stern — all had different characteristics of their sound and as a result you could always tell who you were hearing. What goes into that, I have no idea; it’s about what you hear in your head. Are you born with it? Perhaps. It’s your fingerprint, your stamp.”
Part of it seems to come from Perlman’s mix of charm, big-hearted humanity and quietly wielded perfectionism, qualities which also make him versatile, if pragmatically so. Few classical musicians have crossed the perceived divide between “high” and “popular” culture so successfully. “Everybody who does one thing, they always wish they could do something else!” he jokes. “But whatever you do in music has to come naturally and it has to work. You don’t want to do something just because it’s funny and unusual. So when I did a jazz recording with Oscar Peterson, that’s when I discovered I could actually do klezmer, because after one of the takes an engineer said to me: ‘That doesn’t sound like jazz, it sounds more like klezmer’. And I thought: that’s nice, maybe I can play klezmer! I did some klezmer and felt more comfortable, so it’s good. And now I go back to my day job.”
Perlman has amassed a vast discography of music from Bach to the present day — by way, not least, of Beethoven, the celebrations of whose 250th anniversary this year have largely fallen victim to the pandemic. He picks the Beethoven Violin Concerto as one of the greatest: “It is also difficult - precisely because there are no pyrotechnics. This piece is all about phrasing, all about timing and all about intonation. That’s why it’s devilishly difficult to give a good performance of it. When my students decide to play it, I say: ‘Welcome to a lifelong journey’.”
His own travels, meanwhile, have taken him to realms others can barely dream of. He played chamber music with Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré; he was the soloist for the Israel Philharmonic’s first visits to China, India, Budapest, Warsaw and Russia; his TV appearances are legion, from The Late Show with David Letterman, to Sesame Street, to a documentary by the great Christopher Nupen. He conducts leading orchestras and holds a chair of violin at the Juilliard School. He has been showered with Emmys and Grammys. Medals were presented to him by presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. He played at Barack Obama’s inauguration. And then there’s Schindler’s List.
“It’s the only piece, wherever I go in the world, that is the only request. ‘Play the Theme from Schindler’s List.’ It’s a phenomenon,” he says. “I spoke with [its composer] John Williams about it and he couldn’t understand it either.” Recording the soundtrack was an unforgettable experience: “We were in Boston with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, there was a huge screen with the film, John Williams was conducting it and that’s the first time that I saw it. It was incredibly moving.”
It is not only the score that impresses him, he says, but the way it is used in the film: “The spaces, the silences, are as dramatic as the music. Silence in music is one of the great challenges, very important in making any really successful performance. In a film it’s the same: do you want to flood it with music constantly, or stop and let the audience experience the silence? That’s what this movie score’s about.”
Perlman ordinarily might have come to London this week to receive his Gramophone award, for which John Williams provided a special tribute to him. “I’m worried about getting on a plane,” he says. “But it’s a great honour. I’ve done a lot of recordings — understatement! — so it’s nice that people are acknowledging that they think it’s a meaningful body of work.
“People used to say that I didn’t ‘release’ my recordings, I ‘let them go’. I was, almost to a fault, very critical of the way I sounded. When I listen to my old recordings, the good news is that it sounds pretty good. The bad news is I’m not going to sound like that today, because I’m evolving and sometimes I hear things I wouldn’t do now. That’s a good sign: it means you’re growing as a musician. But I can say that at the time I was recording them, I thought that was a good representation of the way I played.”
Still, air travel is a problem for him at the best of times. Aged four, he was stricken with polio; he has walked with leg braces and crutches ever since and now has a mobility scooter. “Forget about trying to use the facilities in an airplane,” he says. “You don’t go in it, you basically wear it. People with disabilities — and this is nothing new —have to figure out the time the trip would take, then figure out how to deal with diet and drinking so that you don’t have to use the facilities. It’s terrible. Then if you check into a hotel, what makes a room accessible? What makes a bathtub accessible? Some 70-80 per cent of this stuff just doesn’t work, because interior designers and so on don’t really know what it takes to get into a tub or into a bathroom. And they seem to think that every disability is the same. Every one has different variations.” These struggles should be a wake-up call to us all.
Where musical challenges are concerned, though, Perlman says he is “very happy”. “My challenge is to continue to be fascinated by music; to continue to be interested in what I’m doing. One of the great dangers is to be bored, but that’s not the case with me. As long as I’m enthusiastic about what I do, I’ve achieved my goal.”
Itzhak Perlman was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Gramophone Awards 2020, available to watch on medici.tv. Full details of all the winners are available in Gramophone Magazine’s Awards issue, on sale now
