A man with many strings

From the Ed Sullivan show at 13 to Carnegie Hall to star turns on Sesame Street, the violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman has brought classical music to a mass audience. Interview by Nicholas Wroe

Following the death of his friend Luciano Pavarotti in September, the violinist Itzhak Perlman is now almost alone among world-class musicians in attracting the highest levels of critical praise while simultaneously enjoying a career at the very heart of mass entertainment. Perlman, especially in America, is not just a famous musician, he is the famous musician for millions of people - the personification of classical music. So while you can trace his life and career through acclaimed recordings, legendary concerts and learned articles, you can also view his progress through half a century of popular culture via clips on YouTube.

There is plenty of footage of Perlman in concert white tie and tails, performing solo or with major orchestras all over the world. But more striking is his American debut in 1958 on the Ed Sullivan television show, aged just 13 and newly arrived from Israel, his childhood polio forcing him to sit while he played Mendelssohn's violin concerto. Then there's Perlman on Sesame Street - playing a Beethoven duet with the Telly Monster on tuba - or performing John Williams's Oscar-winning Schindler's List score at the Academy Awards ceremony, or introducing the three tenors concert at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Just a few weeks ago, Perlman was the avuncular host of the live network television opening of the new Lincoln centre season in New York. "Television was how I came to the States and I've always felt very comfortable doing it," he explains. "Of course, there are battles. Television will always err on the side of making something not quite as classy as it could be. I try to put my foot down because people in the mass media often don't give audiences credit. To bring a large audience to a piece of serious music and make it accessible does not mean reducing it in any way. And I've learned that if something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good."

Perlman will be in the UK later this month performing Schubert, Beethoven and Strauss at Birmingham Symphony Hall (November 11) and the Barbican (November 13). But he says that, in recent years, playing music has been only a part of his creative life. Conducting and, perhaps most importantly, teaching have become increasingly important. They came together at the prestigious annual summer school for young musicians organised by Perlman's wife of 40 years, Toby Friedlander, when she asked him to coach the orchestra.

"In fact, 'coach' was a code word for conduct. But I turned up and used a pencil rather than a baton to make the point that I wasn't conducting. However, we did get some good results and that's how it started for real. And the conducting and the teaching have changed the way I think about music and the way I play. In retrospect, I see that it was very logical and predictable that each would complement the other. There's a lot of teaching in conducting, a lot of conducting in playing, and a lot of playing in teaching."

Perlman is speaking in a non descript studio in the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he was a student from the age of 13 under the legendary teachers Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay. He has taught there himself since 1999. Although there are a few photos on the wall of him with the likes of Pavarotti and Isaac Stern, he says that this room was, and to some extent remains, "Miss DeLay's studio. Nothing much has changed. This is her desk and chair, and that closet still has a bunch of stuff that is hers. There are even the dolls she had for the younger students. It's a little bit spooky."

He has followed DeLay's teaching technique, which he describes as essentially consultative. "She believed in involving the student in the process. She asked students what they thought about the performance and how it might be improved. I'm the same in that I like to analyse why something is good or not so good. But when I first came here, Mr Galamian was very different. 'Do this, do that, that's no good, change that.' He'd say if we did as he told us we'd play the fiddle. There was no debate. It was a more old-fashioned way of doing things, which was much closer to my first teacher in Israel, Mrs Goldgart. I started off when I was around five and studied with her for eight years. While I don't teach in the same way, I think she was very good and I appreciate what she did for me."

Perlman was born in Tel Aviv in 1945, and while he shies away from the word "prodigy", there is no getting way from his precociousness. He gave his first solo recital aged 10 and was soon appearing with the Israel Broadcasting Orchestra. Such was his burgeoning reputation that when superstar violinists such as Jascha Heifetz or Isaac Stern were passing through, he was asked to play for them. And then came the Ed Sullivan invitation.

"What's interesting is that, up to the age of 13, I was exposed to hardly any recordings," he says. "When we lived in Israel, we didn't even own a record player. But we did listen to the radio at atime when the radio played a lot of classical music. I particularly remember listening to H eifetz and Ida Haendel, who was very popular in Israel. Then we came to the States, registered for a record club that sent us an LP every month, and the explosion really started." He remembers endlessly playing a series of 78s by Fritz Kreisler, but says that while "it was good to put something else in my ear which gave me a new sort of sound, the really important thing is not to latch on to one particular favourite and try to imitate them. There are people who get a sound implanted in their brain and then can't play any other way. It's a real shame."

Perlman makes a point of exposing his students to archive recordings in an eff ort to teach them "where they came from. Unless you are aware of this heritage, your style of playing can become very narrow. It doesn't mean you have to slide like Kreisler used to slide, but it's good to know that's what they did back then. It's very easy to be technically brilliant in the modern manner and not realise that you could still make a sound so pure it ends up like white bread."

But when viewing some of the videos of great performers he admired as a young musician, Perlman has found himself doubting his own youthful judg ment. "When you go back to these fi lms of Heifetz or Oistrakh, they are not always as good as you remember. Either I am becoming a miserable grouch or I have learnt a few things along the way. But that doesn't mean they weren't important to me at the time; on lots of occasions they were very helpful to me."

There was never a doubt in his own mind that he would become a professional musician, but he says his polio - today he uses a combination of walking sticks and an electric wheelchair - prompted people to question whether he could travel enough to have a career. "But for me, and for my family, it never had anything to do with being disabled or anything like that. We always figured that the way you make a career is through the quality of your performance."

He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1963 and won the prestigious Leventritt competition the following year. The prize was to play with the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland orchestras. "And then the rest was up to me. The challenge is not getting a fi rst date, it's getting a second date. I was aware that I had to prove myself constantly. In my fi rst season, I had 15 dates and in my second season 20. The third season I had 35 and that meant I was doing something right. That's basically been the story till today."

Perlman has gone on to win 16 Grammy awards, and three Emmys for music television programmes. He has even sung - "for about 20 seconds. It was my farewell debut" - on James Levine's recording of Tosca starring Renata Scotto and Placido Domingo. He has been involved with comparatively little contemporary music, although he has had work written for him. "Everybody's job is to do certain things," he says. "And anyway, sometimes music doesn't have to be newly written to be made new."

His move into conducting echoed his early performing career. "They had no obligation to invite me again after the initial curiosity of wondering whether this guy who plays the violin quite well can conduct. But it's gone OK."

The similarities between teaching and conducting have been helpful. "I've been lucky to conduct the very best or-chestras in the world: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, the London Philharmonic. What can you tell them about Brahms two or Beethoven five? So you have to work out in your own mind what you want to hear from a performance. It's the same with my students. The standard is extremely high, so what on earth do you tell them? You have to really think about it."

He says that encountering young musicians at Juilliard and at the summer school - Maestro Perlman is known as Mr P at both establishments - leaves him cautiously hopeful for the future of serious music. "The level of violin playing is much higher than it has ever been. But maybe establishing a career is more diffi cult. I advise people not to narrow their goals, but to get involved in chamber music and recitals and a little bit of solo work and orchestra and whatever else is going on. The idea that either they play Carnegie Hall or they do nothing is extremely harmful. I also encourage them to teach, even the youngest kids work with beginners, because it does help you as a player."

The only thing he can't advise on or teach, Perlman says, is whether a musician "can get through to your guts. They have to find that themselves, and some of them never do. Sometimes in this room we break through to that with a student and it sends a chill through your body. The important thing is never to play a piece 'because that is the way it goes'. There is no way it goes until you play it. If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting." He adds that knowing how to play the violin is not playing music: "The Beethoven violin concerto is just a bunch of arpeggios and scales. No mystery there. But if you put your mind in a different groove and tell the story of the music as it reveals itself to you, then you've really got something going on."


Ryvka Goldgart
Ivan Galamian
Dorothy DeLay
Jascha Heifetz
Fritz Kreisler