Perlman’s virtuosity fails him as conductor
Itzhak Perlman is, by all the available evidence, one heckuva nice fellow. He has a megawatt smile and a charming demeanor, and there’s a personable vibe about him that is hard to resist.
These are good qualities, certainly preferable to surliness or to being a control freak. But they don’t serve as qualifications to conduct the San Francisco Symphony, which is what Perlman did on Thursday, May 17, in Davies Symphony Hall.
Call me old- fashioned, but I prefer a guest conductor who can actually, you know, conduct.
That means doing more than just waving your arms vaguely in the general direction of the orchestra, which Perlman did through much of a soggy rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. It means shaping the character of a score with specificity and precision, rather than skimming over the general points as Perlman did in the vivid character sketches of Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations.
On a good day, it could even mean giving the expert musicians of the Symphony room to show off their individual artistry, instead of making them scramble to be sure they were hitting a downbeat at more or less the same time.
It would hardly be fair to suggest that Thursday’s concert was without its rewards or stretches of pleasure, even delight. In particular, Perlman takes to schmaltz like a duck to water — he knows just how to milk a sentimental passage for everything it’s worth, and he has a gift for eliciting lush, even sumptuous playing from an orchestra when that’s called for.
So the waltz movement in the Tchaikovsky, to take the most notable example, danced along with insinuating grace, its rhythms registering delicately but firmly, and its melody spinning out in a seemingly endless skein of notes. The great “Nimrod” variation that sits at the heart of the Elgar found the orchestra playing at
playing at its most suavely thunderous.
But too much of the evening was a matter of ragged entrances and patchy ensemble playing, punctuated by the occasional deft solo turn ( associate principal cellist Peter Wyrick stepped nimbly to the fore for the penultimate movement of the Elgar). And very little of it suggested any particularly careful thought or interpretive strategy, aside from just getting through in one piece.
What Perlman can do, of course — and do extremely well when he cares to — is play the violin. So the evening’s biggest draw came at the beginning, with Bach’s C- Minor Concerto for Oboe and Violin featuring Eugene Izotov as his fellow soloist.
Unfortunately, serving as soloist and conductor simultaneously proved too much to juggle at once ( it’s a double assignment that Perlman has tackled here more than once in the past, never with success). The result was by turns saggy and blunt, and not even Izotov played with his usual distinction.
To hear Perlman in his element, Symphony patrons need only wait until the season- opening gala on Sept. 5, when he’s scheduled to return as violin soloist. At that point, the conducting duties will be in the safe hands of Michael Tilson Thomas.