A Rare Glimpse Of The Human Spirit -- It's Magic When Itzhak Perlman Plays His `Fiddle'

For centuries, fiddle fans have described the violin as the instrument that most closely approximates the human voice.

In our time, fiddler Itzhak Perlman is the violinist who most closely exemplifies the human spirit. In the 47 years he has played the violin, the 51-year-old virtuoso has never lost the ability to communicate the joy of performance - that elusive and often-missing quality that lifts music-making above the level of masterly fingering and bowing to a level of real connection.

That's what we need, and miss, so much in these stressful times. The novelist E.M. Forster's famous exhortation, "Only connect," might have been written with a Perlman concert in mind. Perlman will have another opportunity to connect with Seattle audiences tomorrow, when a sold-out Seattle Symphony Distinguished Artists program will present the violinist together with his longtime accompanist, Janet Goodman Guggenheim, in Stravinsky's "Suite Italienne," Schubert's Fantasie in C Major (D.934) and Dvorak's Sonatina in G Major (Op. 100).

Tickets have been gone for a long time. Perlman's appearances here are relatively infrequent, and even if they weren't, his name is a catalyst for a chemical explosion at the box office.

A few things have gradually changed over the years for the violin superstar. Famous for his good nature, Perlman has become less accessible to interviewers since he celebrated his 50th birthday last year. At the same time, he has become even more accessible to his public, partly by returning to his ethnic roots (Perlman was born in Israel to parents who had emigrated from Poland). He played on the soundtrack of the movie "Schindler's List," and has been part of a remarkable resurgence of klezmer music - the spirited, vital music of celebration that is part of East European Jewish heritage.

Perlman has been featured, along with traditional klezmer bands, in a concert program called "In the Fiddler's House" that aired on PBS' "Great Performances" and is also available in a CD of the same title (another, "Live From the Fiddler's House," is a new release on the Angel label). This past summer's klezmer tour brought Perlman to several festivals in the East and Midwest over a two-month span.

All this is just part of a musical personality that extends from a reverence for Bach and Beethoven up to an appreciation for jazz, the Beatles, '50s rock and even "Turkey in the Straw." It's interesting that the only music Perlman is frank about disliking is the kind of early-music performance in which zealots have stripped away all the vibrato and other expressive devices he loves. When that kind of music comes on the radio, Perlman is likely to switch the dial pretty quickly: He'd rather hear almost anything else.

Perlman's exuberant spirit was refined early, in a crucible of illness that struck when he was a 4-year-old. You would think polio might stop a striving young violinist, but it only made Perlman more determined to succeed in a talent that had nothing to do with his disability. Perlman has the kind of hands you might associate more with bricklaying than with Paganini caprices: big hands with rather thick, stubby fingers.

Big fingers mean that "as you go up on the violin the spaces become smaller and smaller, so you have to be careful not to put your whole finger down because the result could be disastrous," as he once told the BBC "Music" magazine.

This certainly hasn't proved a problem, however, for Perlman, whose grasp of the instrument was so instinctive that he's never had to practice much. Even in his student days, he would seldom put in more than three hours a day. Now, in his maturity, Perlman doesn't practice much at all, unless he is learning a new piece - in which case he might devote a half hour daily, or an hour at most, to learning the music.

Otherwise, the violinist is famous for practicing during sports events on the TV - during the commercials, that is. He'll sit there, watching the match or the game or the event, violin on lap, ready for the beer ads or the car promos to start. Off he goes with a few well-considered minutes of a sonata or a concerto. That's all the practice he needs to maintain a standard his colleagues call "consummate professionalism."

All this contributes to the public's perception of Perlman as - well, as close as you can get to a regular guy under these circumstances. He's a devoted family man, married to another violinist and the proud father of five children (four of them musical; one is a lawyer). After several decades of touring, negotiating service elevators and cramped stairways with crutches and wheelchairs, Perlman also has emerged as a world expert on facilities accessibility, and an impassioned crusader on behalf of those who share his problems getting around.

If only he would get around to Seattle a little more often. Perlman was last here in 1992, in a dazzling duo program with longtime buddy Pinchas Zukerman. For those who don't already have tickets to tomorrow's performance, there is consolation in discography: besides the recent "Fiddler's House" recordings, there also is a tasty disc of Perlman's favorite concert pieces and encores called "A la Carte," with Lawrence Foster and the Abbey Road Ensemble on the EMI Classical label.

Here are all those pieces violin fans have loved for years: the Meditation from "Thais," Wieniawski's "Legende," pieces of Kreisler and Sarasate and Rachmaninoff and plenty more. You can sample this on The Seattle Times' InfoLine, just in case you need a few Perls of wisdom.