Itzhak Perlman on his Houston ties and Beethoven
Itzhak Perlman performs Beethoven's violin concerto this weekend with Houston Symphony conductor Juraj Valčuha (Photo credit: Lisa Marie Mazzucco)
Interview: Itzhak Perlman talks his Houston ties and Beethoven
By Chris Gray
Houston Chronicle
October 19, 2022
Itzhak Perlman may not want to talk baseball (he’s still sore about the Mets), but he’s always happy to talk about the Houston Symphony.
“It's a wonderful orchestra,” says Perlman, now 77. “Everything that I've done with them has been nothing but extremely satisfying. It’s a good group, whether I do a solo with them or whether I conduct them. I'm having a good time there. It's really good. I'm very, very happy.”
Perlman’s history with the symphony dates back to 1967, but his interest is admittedly a little more than professional. His son-in-law, Robert Johnson, plays in the French horn section, and he enjoys taking daughter Ariella up on her restaurant recommendations whenever he’s in town. “I can spend the whole evening not talking about music, just talking about food and wine,” he says.
Perlman is also in the middle of a three-year artistic partnership with the orchestra that, despite some past COVID-related hiccups, resumes this weekend when he performs Beethoven’s violin concerto with Juraj Valčuha conducting. It’ll be his first time working with the symphony’s new music director, but he’s been playing the Beethoven since age 15. Although this time will be different from when he played the concerto ten years ago, or 30, Perlman says it’s never a chore to play it again.
“One thing about that piece that’s quite incredible is no matter how many times you play it, there is always something new in it,” he says. “There is always that challenge when I play it, and I never get tired of it. I could play this thing ten times in a row and [never] say, ‘Oh, not the Beethoven again.’ I would say, ‘Oh yes, the Beethoven again. Yes.’”
Beethoven wrote the concerto for his friend and former teen prodigy Franz Clement — who, amazingly, was later arrested for espionage in 1811 Russia — and completed it in December 1806, the same year of his Fourth Symphony. Clement’s imprisonment and changing tastes prevented it from entering the standard repertoire until it was rescued by another prodigy, 12-year-old Joseph Joachim, in an 1844 London performance with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. (Years later, Joachim befriended Brahms and inspired his famous violin concerto, too.)
The Beethoven concerto’s genius is in its simplicity, Perlman believes.“When you think about it, if you want to simplify what the piece is like, you say, well, it's a couple of nice tunes and a bunch of arpeggios and scales,” the violinist says. “So what do you do with that? And then how do you make it into the monumental work that it is? That’s what it's about.
“It’s challenging, and it’s Beethoven,” he adds. “[If] Beethoven decides that he wants to do something dramatic, that's what is done.”
Itzhak Perlman w/Houston Symphony
When: 8 p.m. Oct. 21-22; 2:30 p.m. Oct. 23
Where: Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana St.
Details: $29-$144; 713-224-7575; houstonsymphony.org
Perlman has won many, many Grammys, four Emmys, and Israel’s Genesis Prize; played the violin solos for John Williams’ Oscar-winning “Schindler’s List” score; and been given different medals by Presidents Reagan (Medal of Liberty) and Clinton (Presidential Medal of Freedom). He’s been on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — in 1964, the same night as the Rolling Stones’ Sullivan debut — “Sesame Street,” and Alison Chernick’s acclaimed 2017 documentary “Itzhak.” Yet after all that, he says Beethoven regularly surprises him still.
“Probably the answer is no difference. And the [question] is, ‘What would he have written had he been able to hear?’," Perlman says. "I think that’s one of the great tragedies of the world, for somebody like Beethoven not being able to hear, yet to [create] such amazing music. And the late quartets still are, absolutely, every time I hear something, it surprises me. It's quite incredible.”
Next April, Perlman will return to Houston to conduct the orchestra and Houston Symphony Chorus in Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the unfinished masterpiece many people believe foreshadows the composer’s own December 1791 demise. It turns out Perlman has plenty of experience with this piece too (of course he does), just in a somewhat unexpected way: it’s a fundamental teaching exercise for the Perlman Music Program, the accelerated camp for young string players Perlman’s wife Toby started in 1994.
“What we are making them do is we make them sing in chorus as part of the program, not just playing the instrument,” Toby’s husband says. “And we've been singing the Mozart Requiem and for so many years that it’s [like] I’m coming back home, just as part of the chorus. I'm just looking so forward to doing that.”
Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.
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