Perlman Substitute Still Reaping Benefits : Music: ‘I’m turning down concerts . . . which is a change,’ says 20-year-old violinist Gil Shaham. He plays Hollywood Bowl Tuesday.

What can life possibly have in store as an encore when you’ve already substituted for Itzhak Perlman in acclaimed, highly publicized performances with the London Symphony Orchestra at age 18?

Gil Shaham’s career as a soloist, already on the rise, went into even greater ascendancy after that celebrated performance two years ago. In January, Carnegie Hall awaits the American-born, Israeli-reared violinist.

Last month, performance commitments had him ricocheting from Hamburg to the Rockies. On Tuesday, he will be soloist in the Mendelssohn Concerto at Hollywood Bowl with David Alan Miller conducting the Philharmonic.

All this attention has been taken in stride by Shaham, now 20. As he sat for a few minutes on the deck of the Explore Bookstore Cafe here, only the bumblebees that flitted among the potted petunias and cosmos as he sipped herbed tomato soup seemed to temporarily rattle his equanimity.

Shaham was in Aspen to perform the Tchaikovsky Concerto under newly appointed festival music director Lawrence Foster. (Their recording of the two Wieniawski concertos, an outgrowth of previous collaborations, is due to be released on the Deutsche Grammophon label late this year). In Aspen, he also took one of his increasingly sporadic lessons with mentor Dorothy DeLay, and gave his first master class to her newest crop of budding violinists--just two or three years his junior--in a kind of baptism by fire.

“Earlier this summer I attended a Grant Park concert in Chicago conducted by David Alan Miller, whom I hadn’t seen since I was a kid playing in the Juilliard pre-college symphony and he happened to be our conductor,” Shaham said.

“It was a great concert, built around the theme of storms. At one point, he asked the front rows to make sounds like raindrops and the back row to make wind sounds. Then he conducted it. It was really fun . . . it was really Hollywood! Afterwards, I went backstage and told him he’d been in L.A. too long.”

Shaham looks forward to working with Miller again, even though he muses about Tuesday’s program.

“Actually,” the violinist acknowledges, “I would have wanted to play Korngold. That would have been great for Hollywood since it’s where he wrote the piece. But we ended up deciding on Mendelssohn.”

Just two years ago, Shaham was shedding his child-prodigy image and planning to take advanced math courses at a joint Columbia University-Juilliard program. Today, he relishes the aftermath of London, playing more than 90 engagements per season. In order to cope with his schedule he’s decided to focus on “one career at a time, even if that means dropping out of school for a semester or two.”

By the time the call came two seasons back to replace an ailing Perlman in London, Shaham had previously stepped in for Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg in Kalamazoo, for Mark Peskanov at the Strawberry Creek Festival in Malibu, for Yehudi Menuhin with the Virginia Symphony and even for pianist Vladimir Horowitz at La Scala in Milan.

But it was the substitution for Perlman that brought him a segment with Peter Jennings on ABC News, coverage in papers from Tel Aviv to Seoul and a flurry of concert bookings that he’s still playing.

“It’s because of Itzhak, because everything he does draws attention,” theorizes Shaham. “Also, it must have been a slow news day.”

Doubtless, London being London, and the presence of an Associated Press reporter backstage who got the story on the wires, contributed to the media’s handling of the event.

“But my fee did go up, and many more concerts came in. In fact, I’m turning down concerts. There are concerts to turn down, which is a change.”

Disclaimers are part of the unaffected-by-success Shaham persona, and his schoolboy grin denies he had anything to do with the outpouring of attention.

Lee Lamont, his New York manager at ICM Artists, views it otherwise: “What did the Perlman substitution do for Gil’s career? Obviously, it brought publicity. But replacements are commonplace now. Read the biography of almost every performer, and chances are they’ve substituted for a superstar.

“I feel Gil’s career has been growing on the strength of his own performance. In London he displayed that he was able to stand up under the pressure of substituting for a world star, and in order to do that, you must be artistically convincing.”

Whether catapulted sharply forward by his London success or propelled on a natural course expected for a talent of his stature, Shaham has found his career perking along vigorously, especially considering he has not gone the competition route and that he eschews image-makers and hype.

Conductor Foster sums up Shaham’s career this way: “Gil has developed into one of the most important violinists today. He has a unique sound and is a terrific communicator. The transition he now has to make is from gifted hotshot to musician, and in his case, it will be a short trip.”