Itzhak Perlman has had a five-star career, made five-star recordings and remains indelibly a five-star presence on the concert platform. This Barbican recital, nominally to mark Perlman’s 70th birthday last August, was a rare chance to pay homage to indisputably one of the great violinists.
What it was not, though, was a five-star recital. And nor, these days, is it true to describe Perlman, as the concert programme did, as “undeniably the reigning virtuoso of the violin”. For all the enduring ease of his playing, there was no mistaking that the unequalled technique of his prime has gone down a notch, nor that his tone is less easily summoned than it once was. Even in the eight additional pieces that he played after his published programme – encores are always a highlight of a Perlman evening – there was the sense of a devoted audience willing the artist to play better than he could.
Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, a 1934 arrangement of six of his Pulcinella pieces, epitomised this. The rhythmic drive of Perlman’s playing in the Tarantella was breathtaking. It was hard to imagine any other violinist generating such momentum and elan. Elsewhere, though, the tone felt forced, and the treatment oddly old-fashioned. But his famous honeyed tone and long-phrased legato have not been lost, and both were there when needed in a well-contrasted and strikingly introspective performance of Franck’s A major Sonata, the strongest performance of the evening, with pianist Rohan de Silva making the piece a duo of equals.
Dvořák’s Sonatina in G, Op 100, completed the advertised programme, played with charm but feeling very much a preliminary to the “additional works”, which Perlman announced with wit and warmth to enormous enthusiasm. Pieces by Kreisler, Wieniawski, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, John Williams and Brahms were dispatched with lilt and unerring line. Fauré’s Berceuse was beautifully muted, and if the closing pyrotechnics of Bazzini’s La Ronde des Lutins were a bit more approximate than they would have been 30 years ago, that really wasn’t the point in this packed-out love-in.
