By HERBERT KUPFERBERG

MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR usually conjures up an image of a performer of advanced, or at least advancing, years, with decades of public performance and a certain amount of venerability attached to his person.

No such description applies to this year’s winner of the coveted award. At thirty-five, Itzhak Perlman is one of the youngest Musicians of the Year to date, and while he has long been admired by violin aficionados he has only relatively recently become—thanks largely to television—a national personality and a media pet. The media, as a matter of fact, have been a substantial factor in Perlman’s career. He first became acquainted with the beauties of the violin, he insists, at the age of four, when as a child in his native Israel he encountered the sound of Jascha Heifetz’s fiddle on a radio broadcast.

“I’m not sure what he was playing,” he says, “but it may have been Joseph Achron’s Hebrew Melody—they played that a lot on the Israel radio. But whatever it was, I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

Similarly, it was electronics that first led Perlman to America. In 1958 he was among a group of young Israelis selected to come to New York for an appearance on the Ed Sullivan television show. In fact, he may well be Ed Sullivan’s greatest contribution to American culture, for following his appearance he decided to remain here and study at Juilliard with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay.

Even Perlman’s first major step toward professional recognition—his winning of the Leventritt Competition in 1964—was not without its media aspects. Awaiting the judges’ decision, he laid down the Guarnerius he had played during the contest, and when he went to pick it up, discovered it had been stolen. It turned up later in a Manhattan pawnshop, but the theft, on top of the award, helped make him Page One news.

The Leventritt has been followed by Perlman’s steady and speedy rise to top international status. To appreciate fully his success, it is perhaps necessary to remember that there is by no means a dearth of violinistic talent in today’s concert field. Yet he clearly is first in a great generation of young fiddlers, with a dazzling technique, a rich and versatile musicality, and a distinctive personal flair. To him music is as much a communicative as an expressive art, and like any great virtuoso, he has an inborn instinct for playing for an audience as well as for himself.

“I suppose violin playing has changed stylistically over the years,” he says, seated comfortably· in the spacious living room of his apartment overlooking the Hudson on New York’s Riverside Drive. “Today it’s less romantic than it used to be, not as gushy. Some people think it’s not as warm. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s more pure musically, though some might say it’s more boring.

“All that I’m concerned with when I hear someone play the violin is whether they’re making a point. Are they communicating with me? Is it logical and spontaneous? Does it make sense, does it mean something to me? What there is to be said in music can be said in so many different ways. The road taken isn’t so important so long as you get to where you want to go.”

Like all violinists, Perlman faces the problem of having to work with a relatively constricted repertory. But more than most, he’s been able to explore and expand its limits. “Sure, we lack the luxury of the pianists with their broad range of music,” he says. “And I could wish there were more piano-violin pieces around. But there’s plenty of stuff to be played. And even with the piano-violin repertory, you can space it out so that you only repeat a sonata every three or four years.”

One of the areas he has been investigating with delight is the works of Fritz Kreisler. “They are period pieces,” he says, “so you play them with some sense of the style of that time. So I try to adapt myself. If they need a few extra slides, sure, I put them in.”

Among Perlman’s most delectable recent musical excursions was his brief public venture into opera singing. Strictly as a gag, he sang the miniscule role of the Jailer in the last act of Puccini’s Tosca with Luciano Pavarotti in a New York Philharmonic Pension Fund benefit, intoning his one line in a surprisingly resonant bass voice.

“That’s the end of my operatic career,” he says. “But I did get an amazing bunch of letters from little companies offering to take me on. One even wrote—I don’t know how seriously—asking me to send a complete list of my available roles, adding that they were specifically interested in Boris Godounov! No, no more opera singing. But I do feel there are parallels of phrasing between string instruments and singing, and they fascinate me.”

It surely is no secret that Itzhak Perlman’s career and accomplishments as a violinist have necessitated his overcoming the handicap of being permanently crippled by poliomyelitis as a child. For all but the first four years of his life he has worn braces on his legs, and he is unique among the great violinists of history in performing as a soloist in a seated position.

During the last few years, he has developed into something of a spokesman for handicapped and disabled people in general, and devotes much of his time to activities on their behalf. Asked whether he himself would have developed into the same musician without his own handicap, he pauses a moment and replies: “I don’t think it has made much difference in my own case, but I really don’t know. I believe that Beethoven would not have been as great a composer without his handicap, but I can’t answer about my problem. I do know that it is more tragic for a musician not to hear than not to walk.”