The Man With Media Moxie

During a rare lazy morning at home in Manhattan, violinist Gil Shaham sits over breakfast at a West Side cafe musing about how times have changed. This week he’s playing the Korngold Violin Concerto with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra by request. Ten years ago, he couldn’t give it away.

Shaham admits that when conductor Yuri Ahronovich first approached him to learn the work for a performance in Jerusalem in 1987, he knew nothing of either the work or its composer, a Viennese emigre to L.A. who found his greatest fame in movie work.

“At that time I would’ve done anything for a gig,” he says, with a boyish grin. “You want me to learn Korngold, I’ll learn Korngold.”

But that concert was canceled, and Shaham found himself with a piece in his repertory that he’d fallen in love with and has been championing ever since.

“At the beginning I’d hear, ‘We can’t take Korngold. The conductor and orchestra don’t know it. They don’t have time to learn it. Our audience won’t like it. Our marketing department can’t sell it.’ Now they say, ‘We can’t take Korngold; we just had it last week.’ ”

An exaggeration, perhaps, but he no longer gets reviews asking if the concerto has a film to go with it.

For Shaham, the piece’s acceptance was only a matter of having people hear it. His first performance of the Korngold, in the violinist-rich atmosphere in Aspen in 1988, created a stir, as did his Zurich premiere a few months later, when the audience put aside its characteristic Swiss reserve to request an encore of the last movement. “That was something that had never happened to me before, or since,” he says.

The work’s biggest breakthrough came with his 1994 recording for Deutsche Grammophon. Though Shaham had pushed for the Korngold from the moment he signed with the label in 1987, he managed to wear them down only by pairing it with the popular Barber Concerto, and by riding a wave of attention generated by other Hollywood composers. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, however, lives on its own merits, he maintains.

‘It’s beautiful and lyrical, yet very skillfully constructed,” he says. “He was regarded as one of the great composers of his day, second only to Richard Strauss. But when he moved to Hollywood, the serious music world turned their backs. There was this feeling, how could there possibly be culture in America--in Hollywood, no less? I think it’s sad. He was a pioneer--the man who brought symphonic music to the movies, who created the Hollywood sound--and yet the basic character of his music is still Viennese, flavored with Johann Strauss. His music has always deserved a place in the concert hall; all it takes is one listen.”

Shaham’s success in championing the Hollywood composer also reflects the growth in his own appeal, which is as connected to the popular culture of his day as Korngold’s was to his.

Take television. Few classical musicians gain much access to the medium, and fewer still know what to do if they do get tapped. But television has helped shape Shaham’s career since the beginning. His first big break, when he was pulled from his New York high school class to substitute for Itzhak Perlman in London in 1989, generated stories on ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning, America.” The Cinderella tale drew the initial attention, but Shaham’s own charisma kept it going. Practically overnight, the young violinist went from 20 bookings a year to 60.

Now 26, with roughly 150 bookings a year, Shaham is among the most visible violinists of his generation, owing largely to television exposure, such as this year’s Grammy Awards, and his video of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” which ran on the Weather Channel in 1994, a story generating a few news items in its own right.

Off-screen, Shaham’s persona combines high romantic musical sensibility with irrepressible Borscht Belt humor. Even in normal conversation, musical discussion is laced with topical jokes. “I’m really into this Mike Tyson thing,” he says at one point. “Classical music needs more of that; if I notice that the conductor is changing tempo, I ought to be able to bite his ears.

“Our industry is perfectly set up for the last century, for the big concert halls,” Shaham says with a sigh. “Nowadays, concert halls don’t reach the broad audience. When we did the Weather Channel, we reached people we’d never reach any other way.”

Nonetheless, Shaham’s Weather Channel outing brought down censure from some critics deploring the industry’s media exploitation of artists. In the New York Times, Alex Ross singled out “the famous young virtuoso playing ‘The Four Seasons’ ” as one of the “portents of doom” in an atmosphere of “promotional hysteria.” The New York Times’ Bernard Holland found Shaham “in grave danger of being taken over by the world of entertainment.”

These accusations carry little weight with either Shaham or Albert Imperato, DG’s North American label chief.

“Look, we haven’t generated any ideas for Gil that haven’t come directly from Gil himself,” Imperato maintains. “The best we’ve done is to take those ideas and help make them happen.”

Those instincts were again borne out in Shaham’s debut on CBS’ “Late Show With David Letterman” last month, when the violinist ingratiated himself by requesting to play “The Banjo and the Fiddler” with Letterman’s music director, Paul Shaffer.

“None of my regular pianists were available,” Shaham says. “He was so nervous, but I was the one who was blown away. He said he wasn’t used to playing from actual music--he takes the chords and does his own thing--but he really has the chops.”

Although Shaham admits to generating ideas, he credits Imperato with a rare willingness to listen. “Normally, if the Weather Channel came up in meeting, it would get a good laugh,” he says. “But I remember talking about this with Albert--we were in a hotel in Baltimore at the time--and I thought, he’s actually going to call them.

“There are still some who think that television cheapens classical music,” he continues. “Some in television think that classical music has no commercial value, and I don’t believe that either. What we do is a lot like what actors do; taking what’s on the page and bringing it to life, and as performers we have to have just as much conviction to be convincing to our audience.

“I’m still naive enough to think that if you have enough conviction in your music, the sky’s the limit.”

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GIL SHAHAM WITH THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL ORCHESTRA, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Dates: Thursday, 8:30 p.m. Prices: $1-$75. Phone: (213) 850-2000.