From Bach to Bloch, Perlman Soars in Recital

There is a youth movement well underway in the violin world. Any notion that the center of fiddling gravity has shifted, however, was elegantly and effortlessly quashed Saturday by Itzhak Perlman in a sold-out recital at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

In recent seasons, Perlman has sometimes seemed both mannered and overly casual in his playing, but that was seldom so here. Only in Beethoven’s aloof and tricky Sonata No. 10 in G, Opus 96, did the violinist appear inconsistently engaged, too readily conceding the senior partnership to his always articulate collaborator of many years, pianist Janet Guggenheim.

The Sonata No. 2, “Poeme Mystique,” of Ernest Bloch found Perlman fully committed. A hothouse hybrid of fey lyric bits and flat-out bravura emotionalism, the piece can sound overwrought and under-thought.

Perlman, however, imbued it with a heroic conscience, musically manifest in incandescent, totally integrated playing of great honesty, character and affirmation. He was backed with interactive nuance by Guggenheim, who supplied an unobtrusively solid foundation for the rhetorical flights on which Perlman soared so ardently.

At the other end of the aesthetic scale was Bach’s Sonata No. 4 in C minor, BWV 1017. Perlman’s account was patrician--noble in sound and spirit, indifferent to the stylistic claims of the period-practice revolutionaries. He was not, however, above openly relishing the jazzy metrical teasing in the last movement. Guggenheim provided a pointed model of just how apt Bach can sound on a modern instrument.

The program ended, typically, with a set of bonbons announced from the stage. The names were all familiar--Kreisler, Wieniawski, Tchaikovsky, Faure, Gershwin and Sarasate--but the pieces were not entirely the usual suspects. Technical display and the projection of passion are required here, and Perlman delivered generously on all counts, unflappable in tone, still astonishing with the bow, and sincere in sentiment and wit alike.