Perlman’s Great Performers Recital at Davies

Violinist Itzhak Perlman (from the San Francisco Symphony Web page for his recital)

Last night violinist Itzhak Perlman returned to Davies Symphony Hall for his latest recital in the San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series. Perlman has not been a stranger to San Francisco; but, according to my archives, I have not encountered him since his Opening Night Gala performance with the San Francisco Symphony in September of 2018. He used that event to promote his Perlman Music Program, bringing six of the alumni in tow. Last night was a more traditional duo recital with pianist Rohan De Silva as accompanist.

Where violin recitals are concerned, “traditional” usually means “beginning with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Sure enough, the evening began with the two-movement K. 301 sonata in G major. The rest of the program took a one-century leap into the last decades of the nineteenth century. The intermission was preceded by César Franck’s A major sonata and followed by the G major sonatina, Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 100.

There were, of course, encores: six of them, all probably familiar to those following violin recitals. Fritz Kreisler was represented by both the familiar “Liebesfreud” (love’s joy, the first of the three Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen pieces) and the less-encountered Opus 3, “Tambourin Chinois.” The other composer given two encores was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the “Chant sans paroles” and “Humoresque,” the second of the two Opus 10 pieces. Perlman then concluded the encores with the one that probably drew the most listeners, the theme that John Williams composed for the movie Schindler’s List.

Taken as a whole, this was an evening of satisfying diversity. However (perhaps because age is catching up on me), it was hard to come away without thinking this had been a “business as usual” encounter. Perlman is clearly as skilled and focused as ever. Nevertheless, there was little, if any, among the stimuli to excite the “little grey cells.” I almost (but not quite) felt that revisiting the album tracks would have been just as stimulating.