Itzhak Perlman Renews the Gold Standard for Violin

Itzhak Perlman is surely one of the best-known quantities in music today. But if you were wondering: He still owns the violin franchise, demonstrated again with characteristic ease and grace Tuesday evening at Royce Hall.

A musician with a 21-CD retrospective out from just one of his record labels hardly lacks definition and presence. Dabbling in conducting, recording klezmer and film music, appearing everywhere on television from “Sesame Street” to David Letterman, Perlman still evidently relishes traditional recitals, here giving a substantial and varied program thoughtful attention.

With Perlman was his longtime collaborator, pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim, and her intelligent and personable virtuosity was crucial to the success of the three duo sonatas on the agenda. It was she who held together the outer movements of Richard Strauss’ fitfully sprawling Sonata in E-flat, allowing Perlman to apply himself to all manner of timbral shading, from throaty roar to feathery caress, coloring in the composer’s quixotic sketches.

Their well-honed partnership paid handsome dividends in the long lines of the central Andante cantabile. Perlman floated with effortless nuance over Guggenheim’s subtly flexible filigree, in poignant melodic free fall.

Perlman’s peerless bow control came to the fore in Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 in D, played with great rhythmic verve and ready lyric charm. Guggenheim sounded unamused by the wit of the finale, but otherwise this was the multifaceted gold standard of Prokofiev playing; incisive, emotional, mercurial and controlled.

The smallest but deepest of the sonatas, Mozart’s haunting E-minor effort, K. 304, proved resistant to the idiosyncratic Perlman magic. All the notes were in place, but disappointingly bland and stylistically uninspired. Quickish tempos, particularly in the second movement, did nothing to deflate the impression of cursory surface skimming.

Tuesday, Perlman seemed to communicate the most with the least substance. Certainly the concluding group of bonbons--six miniatures ranging from Wieniawski’s Caprice in A to Heifetz’s arrangement of “My Man’s Gone Now” from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”--brought forth the latent, ever-expressive fiddler in him. Technical dazzle, sincere but slightly self-deprecating sentiment and endlessly warm, pertinently deployed sound characterized the set, supported with model flair by Guggenheim.