The violinist and his ensemble performed with foot-stamping pizzazz at the Music Center at Strathmore
I was a child when I first saw the violinist Itzhak Perlman perform, and had my life duly changed. It was at London’s Barbican Centre, on November 12 1989, just three days after the Berlin Wall had fallen. I couldn’t have known the intricate connections I see now, of course; or what an extraordinary life that Perlman — who was born, in Tel Aviv-Yafo, in the final weeks of the second world war — has lived. Yet to see him wheeling himself on stage now, exuding his imitable charisma, is to know there has been no attrition, no limits, no slowing down. This is a 78-year-old violinist who is evidently still searching for something.
Last week, Perlman brought a live In the Fiddler’s House show to Bethesda, Maryland, in preparation for a multi-year, multi-country, multi-genre project to commemorate his 80th birthday in 2025. The band featured many superb musicians, including ethnomusicologist-saxophonist Hankus Netsky; Andy Statman, the composer, clarinettist and mandolinist (wearing fluorescent yellow trainers, as you do); and various instrumentalists and singers from the Brave Old World klezmer conservatory. The cavernous Music Center at Strathmore was brimful and buzzing, the fan-heavy audience very much up for the ride.
But if the atmosphere was more akin to a rock concert — albeit with a crowd that included very young children and multifaith elders — many seemed to be experiencing this acoustic fiesta for the first time. There was an easy intimacy about proceedings. From the happy-sad lament of “Kale Bazetsn/Khusidl” to the bubbling vivacity of “Simkhes Toyre Time”, you felt this could almost be a jam session in the company of friends and family, dealing with big feelings, anywhere across the globe.
Music, expressing and addressing as it does the gamut of human experience, can do so much with so little. In this case, sometimes, all it took was a bit of fiddle improv — I like to think Stradivarius would have approved — or a keening Hebrew liturgical vocal; or a flavourful Yiddish or Ladino harmonic flourish, to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And sometimes, what it took was Netsky encouraging us to get up and dance in the aisles, as if we were guests at a wedding.
It was in 1998 that Perlman first presented In the Fiddler’s House with a group of star klezmorim. Three decades later, the project has lost none of its charm and foot-stamping pizzazz. This “old world” music — much of it rooted in the folk traditions of what is now Ukraine, but sounding for all the world like the melting pot that is simply global humanity — feels particularly resonant in our current one.
Source: Financial Times
