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RECITAL REVIEW
Rohan De Silva
February 4, 2007
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Shrinking Zellerbach Hall By Michael Katz
Violin giant Itzhak Perlman played in the Cal Performances series last Tuesday, and shrank Berkeley's massive Zellerbach Hall. Not by filling the sold-out auditorium with an outsize ego, but by radiating such humility that the walls seemed to melt inward. At least from our eighth-row seats, the recital offered the intimate communion of a parlor performance.
"This is unpretentious, like your favorite uncle visiting and playing some music after dinner," remarked my violinist friend and technical advisor, Jane Leber Herr, the Prometheus Orchestra's former concertmaster. That is, if your uncle were a superstar violinist, and if one of the world's top piano accompanists, Rohan de Silva, also turned up for dessert.
The program began with the cascading Romanticism of Schubert's Rondeau Brillant in B minor. Perlman's incisive bowing brought out the piece's playful and exultant moods, stealing just a hint of the fire he has shown in occasional detours into klezmer music. Next up was César Franck's lyrical Sonata in A Major, a piece memorialized in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and since learned by generations of young soloists. Perlman's bowing here was slower and more resonant, drawing a clear arc from the opening's plaintiveness to the last two movements' overflowing joy.
Throughout the evening, the Sri Lankan-born De Silva showed why he's one of the world's most sought-after accompanists. He complemented Perlman unerringly in tempo, dynamics, and tone. Where Perlman's violin was bright sunlight, De Silva's piano was shimmering blue water.
Perlman's followers know that his legs were paralyzed at age 4 by polio. He plays seated, and walks only with crutches and with obvious difficulty. It's dramatic to watch him painstakingly rise for each bow, then walk offstage and back on, with his legs swinging beneath him. So the applause for each piece came in two rising waves. Even beyond surviving polio, Perlman's path to virtuosity wasn't easy. His father was a Tel Aviv barber, who recognized his son's talent and managed to move the family to New York so that Itzhak could study at the Juilliard School. What was most affecting about Tuesday's concert — and what most shrank the hall — was watching Perlman's unassuming, workmanlike expressions of contentment as he drew beautiful sounds out of his Stradivarius. You could almost see a barber calmly trimming a familiar customer's hair. Perlman sometimes looked quietly surprised and delighted by how a passage turned out, as if wondering, "How did I manage that?" My friend Jane's expert ear caught occasional "crunches" and intonation glitches in his playing. But for me and most of the audience, any technical slips were deeply lost within the music's joy and expressiveness. Two people near me nodded their heads in tempo all evening, as if bonding with a jazz trio. Rounding out the scheduled program after the intermission were Lukas Foss' Three American Pieces from 1944. These wartime miniatures by a young, newly naturalized German refugee are commonly described as nationalistic offerings, in the tradition of Copland. Yet they sounded surprisingly flavored by Foss' earlier exile in France during the 1930s. The opening "Early Song" echoes Erik Satie's haunting Gymnopédies to my ear. The closing "Composer's Holiday," traditionally described as depicting a hoedown, smuggled in wisps of Parisian cabaret music. This was Coplandesque music, for sure — if Copland had stayed in Paris years beyond his studies with Nadia Boulanger, and gone native.
Perlman typically ends his recitals in shuffle mode, selecting — on the fly — a group of short pieces that serve as integral encores. He set a comic keynote for this home stretch by holding up a sheet of densely inked paper. "This is a computer printout of exactly what I played here 20 years ago," he said. "For those of you who were here then, I want to make sure you don't get a repeat." He then launched into a set of "transcriptions" attributed to various composers by violinist Fritz Kreisler, who claimed to have found the works in a Vienna attic. (In 1935, Kreisler admitted to having written most of them himself.) Perlman's best yarn was his introduction of a miniature that Tchaikovsky had allegedly written for a long-imprisoned Russian friend: "It's called, of course, Chanson sans Parole." The piece itself was streamlined and soaring. Especially memorable here were two authentic transcriptions. The first was violinist Jascha Heifetz' setting of Domenico Paradies' 1754 Toccata. It offered some of the evening's most musically interesting moments, with forward-looking harmonies overlaid on a disciplined Baroque rhythm. Perlman and De Silva played it with peppery fury. The recital ended with a Spanish dance that Kreisler really did transcribe from Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve. Here, Perlman indulged us in a frenzy of unabashed virtuosity, with rapid spiccato bowing, ringing double stops, and radiant joy. Then Perlman and De Silva rose one last time and bowed from the stage's edge, acknowledging a standing ovation.
(Michael Katz is a writer and sometime classical guitarist. He studied music at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and Dartmouth College. He was an early adopter of vintage Philip Glass through composer Bob Telson, Glass' then-organist and Katz's music-camp professor of rock and roll. He has also freelanced for the Berkeley Daily Planet, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Boston Globe.)
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