Violinist Itzhak Perlman performed a recital concert Thursday night at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.
Violinist Itzhak Perlman performed a recital concert Thursday night at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.
Photo: Courtesy PhotoViolinist Itzhak Perlman on Thursday gave a recital in San Antonio that left no doubt why he is the statesman of his instrument.
At 72, Perlman is not slowing down but pressing ahead in his career. Thursday's program presented some of the deepest, most difficult and complex pieces in the violin-piano repertory, chosen by Perlman just to see how well he could do them.
As always, the results were breathtaking for the sold-out audience of about 1,750 people. The concert was Perlman's second at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, coming almost exactly three years after his 2015 show.
Perlman and his longtime touring piano accompanist, Rohan De Silva, began the program with Franz Schubert's Rondo for Violin and Piano, D. 895, which developed from a slow march to a series of happy-go-lucky passages, punctuated by gallops.
Perlman's authority over the material and his violin was immediately clear, the sweet high notes, the warm middle range and the lustrous lower register.
The Richard Strauss Violin Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 18, was dense in sound, highlighting the composer's transition from chamber music to his mighty tone poems for the orchestra. Heroic motifs in the outer movements suggested "Don Juan" proportions.
As gratifying as the first two pieces were, they set the stage for the crowning work among the three listed program pieces, Claude Debussy's neoclassical Violin Sonata in G minor, L. 140. The melodies were fragmentary, dreamy and mystical, becoming spellbinding.
Perlman owns several performance violins, one of them a Stradivarius. Whichever one he chose for Thursday's concert was perfect for the focused H-E-B Performance Hall acoustics. Perlman was able to shift from soft and subtle to bold and fiery with clarity. When the music called for it, Perlman backed off on the volume to let De Silva take the spotlight.
Exiting the stage after the three main pieces, Perlman, a polio survivor, motored back onto the stage on his scooter to receive a standing ovation and to begin playing seven short pieces. He joked he had studied a computer printout of everything he has ever played in San Antonio "since 1912."
Three of the short pieces were by Fritz Kreisler, the light-hearted "Tempo di Minuetto in the style of Gaetano Pugnani," the playful "Marche Miniature Viennoise" and the zippy "Tambourin Chinois."
The short pieces also included the Gabriel Fauré's lovely "Berceuse." But the heartwarming moment came with a piece he really didn't have to announce, John Williams' "Theme from 'Schindler's List.'"
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