‘Music is not a recipe': Violinist Itzhak Perlman talks about putting his life into an autobiographical show
Years ago, the violinist, conductor and pedagogue attended Billy Crystal's autobiographical one-man show, '700 Sundays.' He left inspired. 'I thought that it might be fun to do this with my life and music,' Perlman says.
That seed sprouted into 'An Evening with Itzhak Perlman,' an autobiographical recital coming to the Chicago Theatre April 21. Technically, it's not a one-man show — Perlman will be joined by pianist Rohan de Silva, a longtime collaborator — but it's every bit as intimate, interspersing musical selections with personal anecdotes, photos, and clips from the 2017 documentary 'Itzhak.'
If anything, the challenge will be confining Perlman's story to a single evening. A polio survivor, he was born in 1945 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Tel Aviv. Israel is now a major player in the world of classical music, churning out many a high-flying musician, but in Perlman's day, that wasn't so. That, atop Perlman's disability — he uses crutches and a motorized scooter — made him, in the eyes of many, an underdog.
'The Ed Sullivan Show' changed his life overnight. Appearing on the show for the first time in 1958, as a preteen, Perlman was brought to the attention of the faculty at Juilliard in New York, where he himself now teaches. His career since has more than proved his naysayers wrong, building a résumé and name recognition rivaled by few others in classical music and beyond. At nearly 80, Perlman still giddily transcends genre, whether playing klezmer, duetting with jazz pianist Oscar Peterson or appearing onstage with Billy Joel.
Perlman connected with the Tribune from his home in New York to talk about his upcoming show at the Chicago Theatre. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: So much of your career is about interpreting the works of other artists — in your case, composers. For this show, in a way, your life is the artwork you're interpreting. How did you decide what you wanted to include, as opposed to what you wanted to keep private?
A: That's a good question. All I know is that I know what I don't want to do and I know what I do want to do. When you think about it, there's so much stuff about anybody that you can read online. There's very little privacy. What this show does is give my personal point of view as to what was happening in my life.
Q: It seems challenging to pick just a few pieces for this program. How did you begin to curate this show?
A: Well, I don't want to tell you everything … but we tried to make the music fit the story. There were some stories from when I was developing as an artist, so of course I had to play those pieces: pieces I played for a contest, pieces I studied when I was 6 or 7 years old, pieces my teacher (the legendary Dorothy DeLay, who taught Perlman at Juilliard) gave me when she first met me, and so on and so forth.
Q: You used the word 'development.' One of the things I admire about you is that you've continued to develop musically during your whole career, sometimes very publicly. For example, the documentary 'In the Fiddler's House' captured your experience learning klezmer for the first time, at a point when your classical career was already well established. How did you go about letting people into this intimate experience of learning an art form for the first time, with cameras rolling?
A: When I was approached by PBS to host a show about klezmer, I had absolutely no experience playing it. But to be the host of a show sounded very, very good. There were three or four klezmer groups participating in the show. I met with them, and they asked, 'Would you like to jam with us?' I said, 'Gee, I don't know; I've never done it before.' But I'd heard that kind of sound growing up; it was not foreign to me at all. One thing led to another, and we started to play.
(Eventually) they said, 'Why don't we do some (live) shows, and instead of being the host, you could be part of the show!' That's how it started to develop, and now it's been almost 30 years. We did a couple of concerts just two days ago, in Cleveland and near Washington. We're still having a fantastic time.
There is a kind of improvisation involved in klezmer, (whereas) in classical music, there is very little improvisation. Instead, the improvisation is very subtle — it's musical improvisation, not so much a note improvisation. So, for me, this is something that I always look forward to.
Q: Are there ways in which that freedom has inspired or changed your classical playing?
A: I always say to my students, you don't play something now the same way you did yesterday. If you repeat the same piece over and over again, that's when the improvisation (becomes) so important: you still keep the interest of the piece in your head. To play a recital for the first time is good, but to play it for the second or third time? That's when it becomes a little bit of a challenge. … How do we play the Beethoven C minor Sonata or Kreutzer Sonata today, as opposed to five years ago?
I always say that it's not like baking a cake, where you have that much flour, that much sugar. Music is not a recipe. It's maybe like an eating contest! It becomes spontaneous.
Q: You mentioned your students. In fact, a former student of yours I'm excited about, Randall Goosby, is playing in Chicago soon. Being so attuned to the younger generation of violinists coming up, I'm curious if there's anything you've noticed about them that differs, maybe, from the students you taught when you first began teaching decades ago.
A: I don't know if there is anything absolutely different today than before. All I can tell you is that the level of playing today is absolutely incredible. I've been lucky to teach extremely good musicians at the Juilliard School and Perlman Music Program, (which) my wife and I started 30 years ago. We always listen to the audition tapes, and they're mind-boggling. But that special 'thing' is just as rare as it used to be — this thing that makes you cry. Every now and then, you get that.
Q: You're turning 80 this year. Why did you feel this stage of your career was the right time for an autobiographical show?
A: Well, I've been doing this show for a while — like, two, three years. It's so I can give people a choice of what I can do. I can do a straight recital, or I can do something like this, (because) I love to talk to the audience. When I first started talking to the audience, there was a concert where I just felt like I wanted to play, and I didn't say anything. Then, I got a letter: 'I heard you play, and you didn't say anything.' People got so used to to me talking!
So, this is just another experience of mine. So far, the audience has liked it. Well, either that, or they pretended that they liked it. (Laughs)
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
13 hours ago
- Time Magazine
The True Story Behind the 'Sunday Best'
On July 21, Netflix debuted Sunday Best, a documentary about The Ed Sullivan Show—the longest-running variety show in U.S. broadcast history—and how it featured Black American performers at a time when discrimination was still rampant in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the documentary highlights how racism never really went away. The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired from 1948 to 1971 and boasted between 35 and 50 million viewers each Sunday night, was one of the first mainstream stages to showcase Black talent—as the artists wanted to be seen. Viewers will see snippets of past performances on the show by Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, James Brown, The Jackson 5, and The Supremes. In the documentary, entertainment greats like Belafonte and Smokey Robinson talk about the influence of Sullivan's show, and through a recreation of Ed Sullivan's voice, Sunday Best features Sullivan's comments on racial issues over the years, verbatim from his letters, articles, and columns. 'He was a door opener, especially for Black artists,' says Otis Williams, lead singer of The Temptations. 'This man opened up his door and let artists come on his show to express and be seen.' Here's a look at how the doc dives into Sullivan's modern (for his time) worldview, featuring the Black entertainers who talk about how much it meant to be on his Sunday night show. A progressive streak Sunday Best argues that one of the reasons that Sullivan was so open-minded was because he grew up poor in Harlem, at a time when it had a sizable Irish and Jewish population. The Irish had a history of facing discrimination, so Sullivan was more attuned to the mistreatment of Black people in America. As a high schooler in Port Chester, N.Y., Sullivan played baseball and regularly encountered teams with Black players, so he believed in integration from an early age. As Sullivan explains in a TV interview, 'When we played baseball [at] Port Chester High School, there were Negroes in the league, and some fellas actually said they would not play against a Negro. I always resented them very deeply because the Irish had gone through that when they first came…My parents knew these things were wrong, and they were not just broad-minded, but sensible.' In fact, during his first career as a journalist, he slammed New York University's decision to bench a Black player during a game against the University of Georgia in a column he wrote as sports editor for the New York Evening Graphic. 'I was sickened to read NYU's agreement to bench a negro player for the entire game,' he wrote in 1929. 'What a shameful state of affairs this is…If a New York City university allows the Mason-Dixon line to be erected in the center of its playing field, then that university should disband its football [team] for all time.' And he didn't hold back when he started hosting a variety TV show in 1948—renamed The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955. 'We've been called upon to search our hearts and souls of hatred, cleanse them of a natural hate and fear for our neighbors…Bigotry and intolerance, racial or religious hate and discrimination are spiritual acts of treason.' He also called upon Americans to 'join in this great crusade for our brotherhood' for a 'united America is the sole remaining hope for our shattered world.' Door opener In Sunday Best, singer Dionne Warwick says Sullivan 'wanted his audience to understand that there was a lot of talent out there that needed exposure.' Belafonte, who appeared on the Ed Sullivan show 10 times, says Sullivan 'pushed the envelope as far as the envelope could be pushed.' He says CBS network executives almost stopped him from first performing on the show in 1953 because of his left-wing politics, and Sullivan called him to tell him he might have to cancel the appearance. But Sullivan was the one who convinced the network to let the show go on. 'He gave me a chance to talk to him about acts considered rebellious,' Belafonte explains. 'Those who weren't happy about giving us the platform with us about politics…Ed took the position, 'let's test it, and see where it would go.'' Ed Sullivan still had Nat King Cole on the show in May 1956, a month after the entertainer was attacked in Birmingham, Alabama. He had the child prodigy Stevie Wonder on in 1964 when he was only 13 years old. Members of the Jackson 5 talked about how their 1969 appearance helped launch them to a new level of fame. 'To Motown, The Ed Sullivan Show was the ultimate,' Berry Gordy, Motown Records founder, says in the doc. 'If it was a hot act, Ed Sullivan had them. It was American culture.' And though Sullivan died in 1974 at the age of 73, music can still bring people together. As Robinson puts it, 'Music is the international language. It's the barrier breaker.'
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Boston Globe
Ed Sullivan emerges as a civil rights pioneer in ‘Sunday Best'
It's a lively pop history lesson, and a bittersweet one. Jenkins, a stellar journalist and filmmaker, erudite, comically barbed pop culture and race riff 'ego trip's Big Book of Racism,' he described himself to me as 'a big, scary Black man.' His other documentaries include the hip-hop fashion study 'Fresh Dressed' and 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues,' which, like 'Sunday Best,' looks at an establishment figure whose actions were more progressive than they may have seemed during his lifetime. Armstrong is among the artists we see performing on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and its predecessor, 'Toast of the Town.' So are (deep breath) Ike and Tina Turner, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald … you get the picture. Sullivan famously had Elvis (in 1956 and 1957), and the Beatles, in 1964 and 1965. But he also had all of the above, and many more. Advertisement Every Sunday night on CBS from 1948 to 1971 Sullivan booked and championed artists he admired, regardless of color. This was a big deal, especially in the '40s and the '50s, but even into the '60s, when 'The Ed Sullivan Show' was sharing airspace with news footage of fire hoses and police dogs assailing civil rights protesters. As the doc explains, Sullivan got heat from CBS and from his major sponsor, Lincoln-Mercury, for his color-blind booking. Lincoln-Mercury dropped him in 1962; the company never came out and pinned the decision on Southern viewers' objection to Sullivan's booking, but that clearly played a part. Segregationists railed against Sullivan, who had the temerity to challenge notions of white supremacy. The doc also traces Sullivan's early life, beginning with his childhood in Harlem (then largely Irish and Jewish), where he developed a healthy distrust of racism. 'Sunday Best' leans into performance footage, which is a very good thing. Try not to get chills watching a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder blazing through the harmonica parts of 'Fingertips,' or the Jackson 5, with a pipsqueak Michael Jackson up front, jamming through 'The Love You Save.' Jenkins makes the wise choice to let many of the songs keep playing over footage that diverges from performance. For instance, the music from an early James Brown appearance keeps playing as we follow the story of how a young Sullivan, as a New York sports columnist, laid into New York University for benching a star Black player for a home game against the University of Georgia. 'What a shameful state of affairs,' we hear Sullivan say as the text of his column appears on the screen. Advertisement How, you might ask, do we hear him say this? This brings us to the oddest feature of 'Sunday Best,' and it takes a little getting used to. As onscreen text tells us at the beginning of the doc, 'Ed Sullivan's voice has been recreated in select portions of this film. His words have been taken verbatim from thousands of columns, articles and letters he wrote throughout his life.' It's a strange sensation, hearing a voice we know only from its public utterances speaking in more intimate tones, and how you respond probably depends on your feelings about the age of no-limits AI. The whole thing has a bit of a bringing-out-the-dead vibe. It bothered me at first, but before long I accepted it as part of the film's general landscape. It's an intriguing way to go right to the source, and it cuts down on the wall-to-wall talking head factor that drives so many documentaries. 'Sunday Best' can get dangerously close to anointing its subject as Saint Ed. The film has a single-minded argument to make, and it's not terribly interested in painting a warts-and-all portrait. But it makes that argument well, and with a head-nodding beat. The Motown connection is a sort of capstone for the whole enterprise; as we hear testimonials from Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, still alive and kicking at 95, we realize that the label was tailor-made for Sullivan's mission of presenting Black artists to as many people as possible. It seems some civil rights trailblazers come in unlikely packages. Advertisement SUNDAY BEST Directed by Sacha Jenkins. On Netflix starting Monday. 90 minutes.
Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Vintage Chicago Tribune: 6 activities people used to do in the city during the summer
There are activities we can't wait to experience here each summer — catching a concert in a park; watching Buckingham Fountain's majestic water display explode 150 feet into the air; taking a dip to cool off in Lake Michigan; swaying with thousands of others to the sounds of the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field; or just playing tourist in our hometown. Yet Chicagoans of another era had their own ways of celebrating warm weather that we just don't do today. Here's a look back at six of them. The first match in the sport of kings took place in Chicago, according to the U.S. Polo Association, at Lincoln Park in October 1879. 'For the benefit of the ignorant, polo may be described as shinney (pick-up game of hockey) on horseback, or, rather, ponyback,' the Tribune reported at the time. Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, which fielded its first polo team in 1896, hosted an epic championship series that pitted the best players in the United States — one team from the East Coast and the other from the West — against each other in August 1933. The best-of-three tourney with spectator seating for 20,000 people was the brainchild of Chicago Blackhawks team founder and U.S. Polo Association executive committee member Maj. Frederic McLaughlin. West won the national championship 12-6. A smaller, faster form of the game called arena polo was played indoors for years at the Chicago Avenue Armory. Oak Brook Polo Club, which was founded by Paul Butler in 1922, and closed earlier this year, is considered one of the oldest of its kind in the U.S. It hosted the U.S. Open Polo Championship for 24 seasons. Prince (now King) Charles was part of a memorable match there on Sept. 5, 1986, when he and England's star player Andrew Seavill were both laid out on the ground after a collision. After a five-minute pause, both the player and the prince appeared to be OK. 'I liked the part when he fell, the best,' said Chicago-based political satirist Aaron Freeman. 'It's not often you see people who won the genetic lottery embarrassing themselves in public.' Before highways were plentiful and car ownership was common, Chicagoans headed to the city's docks to board steamships destined for Milwaukee; Mackinac Island, Michigan; or a variety of other lakeside communities. One such ship was the SS Eastland, which was chartered by Western Electric Co. on July 24, 1915, to transport about 2,500 employees and their families across Lake Michigan to a company picnic at 'the Coney Island of the Midwest' Michigan City, Indiana. Rare Eastland disaster photos discovered in Tribune basementAs people boarded the ship that morning at the Chicago River between LaSalle Drive and Clark Street, however, the Eastland began to list to its side. The ship overturned and within minutes 844 people — including 22 entire families and four members of the Eastland's crew — were dead. Chicago Bears owner George Halas was supposed to be aboard the ship. It was the deadliest day ever in Chicago and the greatest peacetime inland waterways disaster in American history. Several hundred performers — including Goliath the sea elephant — arrived in August 1931, to perform as part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which became a fixture of summer in Soldier Field's parking lot for decades. Successive open-air 'floating hospitals' in Lincoln Park were built between the 1870s and the 1900s and offered excursions from the piers on Lake Michigan. In 1914, the Chicago Daily News offered to fund a more permanent sanitarium building. Opened in 1921, the impressive Prairie-style structure was one of several Lincoln Park buildings designed by Dwight H. Perkins of the firm Perkins, Fellows, and Hamilton. Perkins, an important Chicago social reformer and Prairie School architect, designed buildings including Café Brauer, the Lion House in the Lincoln Park Zoo and the North Pond Cafe. Vintage Chicago Tribune: Unexpected finds in Chicago parksThe impressive Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Sanitarium building was constructed in brick with a steel arched pavilion with 250 basket baby cribs, nurseries and rooms for older children. The breezes through the shelter were believed to cure babies suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. Free health services, milk and lunches were provided to more than 30,000 children each summer until 1939, when the sanitarium closed. Major reconstruction of Lake Shore Drive led to the demolition of the building's front entrance. During World War II, the structure became an official recreation center for the United Service Organization. The Chicago Park District converted the building to Theatre on the Lake in the early 1950s. Today it's a lakefront restaurant and venue that hosts concerts and theater events. The rodeo originated in the Southwest as a way for ranchers to celebrate the annual cattle roundup. Promoters brought it to Chicago and other northern cites to capitalize on Americans' nostalgic fascination with the Wild West. From 1925 to 1929, Tex Austin presented rodeos first at Soldier Field and then indoors at Chicago Stadium — though rodeo competitions didn't end in Chicago after Austin's contest packed up and left for good. In 1927, Soldier Field hosted World Championship Rodeo. The sights and thrills of Austin's rodeos had a wide appeal. Women were half of the 35,000 spectators in Soldier Field on the opening day of the 1925 rodeo, the Tribune's society columnist reported. 'The shouts of approval that hit against the sides of the Field Museum and bounced back again were just as soprano as they were deep bass.' Rodeo competition also was open to women as well as Black people and Native Americans, when other professional sports were segregated or off-limits to them. Austin carried the rodeo far afield. He mounted shows in Madison Square Garden, Hollywood and London. His promotions went belly up in the Great Depression, and he opened a restaurant in Santa Fe. But going blind in 1938, he committed suicide. He left a note asking his wife's forgiveness and, on their coach, a stack of photographs of his rodeo days, a time when 'he appeared every inch at home.' Starting 75 years before Lollapalooza took up residence in Grant Park, the Chicagoland Music Festival claimed gaudy attendance numbers at the annual Soldier Field events, figures no longer possible in the renovated stadium. Like the College All-Star Game, Golden Gloves boxing, the Silver Skates Derby and numerous other events, including airplane and horse races, fashion and kite-flying shows, bowling tournaments and wrestling matches, the music festival was organized and sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper wasn't shy about promoting its own events in its news pages — especially once longtime publisher Col. Robert McCormick took a liking to it. It's hard to say how much the Tribune's glowing coverage helped the festival thrive, but even accounting for some exaggeration and boosterism, and assuming the reporter was ordered to don his rose-colored glasses, that first Chicagoland Music Festival was a spectacle. Unlike most events, the Chicagoland Music Festival didn't start small and grow. It started big and became huge. About 150,000 — with thousands more unable to get in the stadium — watched the inaugural show Aug. 23, 1930. There were so many people, in fact, that spectators sitting on the sidelines impeded the drum corps' movements. The thrill — and the showmanship — started with the public address announcement: 'You are sitting now in the glow of 392,000 watts of light, and in order that you may have a standard of comparison, I will add that that is three times as large a volume of light as at any baseball game that ever was played at night. Friends, it is the greatest artificial illumination of a single arena in the world's history.' To which the Tribune reported: 'The people rapturously applaud these words. They are rising to the fact that they have come to a big show.' Before that first night was out, the crowd saw 21 marching bands and 16 drum corps, which entered the arena in one bombastic burst. They heard the festival band play the John Philip Sousa marches 'The Washington Post,' 'Stars and Stripes Forever' and 'U.S. Field Artillery.' Another highlight of the night was a 1,000-member African American choir singing the spiritual 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.' The climax of that first evening was the 'Hallelujah' chorus from Handel's 'Messiah,' performed by a combined 3,000-voice choir. While numerous famous singers and musicians played at the festival over the decades, including Louis Armstrong, Frankie Avalon and Mahalia Jackson, for many Chicagoans and their beaming parents, the highlight of the show was no doubt their own children. Thanks for reading!
