By Sedgwick Clark<\/b><\/p>\n
Last Monday was one of the best concerts I\u2019ve heard so far this season. Itzhak Perlman led the Juilliard Orchestra in an all-Tchaikovsky program at David Geffen Hall:\u00a0Romeo and Juliet<\/i>,\u00a0Rococo <\/i>Variations\u00a0<\/i>for cello and orchestra, featuring the impressive soloist Edvard Pogossian, and the Sixth Symphony (Path\u00e9tique<\/i>). I love the commitment and brio<\/i> of student orchestras, and these young musicians were true to form.<\/b><\/p>\n
The glory of the evening\u2014surprise, surprise!\u2014was the warm and expressive string tone that Perlman elicited from the orchestra, in a hall notoriously unfriendly to such qualities. Vibrato in unison was the watchword of the night, and the sound bloomed from the stage with unerring beauty. Blindfolded, one even might have mistaken them for the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which Perlman recorded the Tchaikovsky concerto under Ormandy. The love music in\u00a0Romeo\u00a0<\/i>and the often-distorted second theme in the first movement of the Path\u00e9tique<\/i> sang as if one were hearing them for the first time. How fortunate that these young musicians were able to play these melodies so simply and eloquently under Perlman, before maestro X commands them to torture the line with \u201cpersonal\u201d expressiveness. \u00a0And yet Perlman was never impersonal\u2014his love of Tchaikovsky shone through vividly in every bar, with no accelerandos where the score didn’t ask for them, just a natural tightening of tempo that any great musician feels in an emotionally heightened passage.<\/p>\n
The sound in row V, directly in the middle of the orchestra section, offered ideal balances, admirably clear details, and a welcome absence of glare. Amazingly, the strings were never overwhelmed, even by Tchaikovsky\u2019s brassy double- and triple-forte climaxes at the height of Romeo<\/i>\u2019s family feuding <\/i>and the Path\u00e9tique<\/i>\u2019s third-movement March. I was even ready to suggest that Lincoln Center should forget the renovation until I spoke afterwards with friends in a side box who experienced the same old same old.<\/p>\n
Perlman turned 70 this year. I first heard him in Chicago\u2019s Orchestra Hall on December 28, 1966, an all-Stravinsky program in which the 21-year-old violinist played the 84-year-old composer\u2019s Violin Concerto, conducted by Robert Craft. I was blown away! Stravinsky, in what was billed as his \u201cfinal Chicago appearance,\u201d conducted his Fireworks<\/i>, excerpts from Petrushka<\/i>, and the 1945 Firebird <\/i>Suite. Perlman\u2019s birthday was celebrated by Warner Classics on disc by a 77-CD box of his EMI recordings and by a 25-CD Deutsche Grammophon box of DG and Decca recordings. Perhaps his next celebratory release will contain recordings as a conductor.<\/p>\n