Itzhak Perlman

Undeniably the reigning virtuoso of the violin, ITZHAK PERLMAN enjoys superstar status rarely afforded a classical musician. President Reagan granted him a “Medal of Liberty” in 1986, and President Clinton awarded him the “National Medal of Arts” in December 2000. In December 2003, he received a Kennedy Center Honor celebrating his distinguished achievements. He recently performed at the State Dinner for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, hosted by President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush at the White House.
 
Born in Israel in 1945, Perlman completed his initial training at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. He came to New York and was soon propelled into the international arena with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958. Following his studies at the Juilliard School with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition in 1964, which led to a burgeoning worldwide career. Since then, he has appeared with every major orchestra and in recitals and festivals around the world.
 
Perlman is a frequent presence on the conductor’s podium, and through this medium he further delights his audiences. He has performed as a conductor with the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the National Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Montreal, and Toronto, as well as at the Ravinia and OK Mozart festivals. He was Music Advisor of the St. Louis Symphony from 2002 to 2004, where he made regular conducting appearances, and he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony from 2001 to 2005. During the 2007/08 season he conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Toronto Symphony. Internationally, Perlman has conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra, and the Israel Philharmonic.
 
As a soloist, Perlman continues to visit major centers throughout the world. Highlights of his 2007/08 season include summer performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center and Saratoga Performing Arts Center and with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood; recitals throughout Europe and the United States, including London, Paris, Brussels, Zurich, Boston, and Los Angeles, and a tour of Japan, where he will be heard both in recital and with orchestra. He also appears with students from the Perlman Music Program in a three-concert series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
 
A major presence in the performing arts on television, Perlman has been honored with four Emmy Awards, most recently for the PBS documentary Fiddling for the Future, a film about the Perlman Music Program and his work as a teacher and conductor there. In July of 2004, PBS aired a special entitled Perlman in Shanghai, which chronicled a historic and unforgettable visit of the Perlman Music Program to China. Perlman’s third Emmy Award recognized his dedication to Klezmer music, as profiled in the 1995 PBS television special In the Fiddler’s House.
 
Perlman has entertained and enlightened millions of TV viewers of all ages on popular shows as diverse as The Late Show with David Letterman, Sesame Street, the PBS series The Frugal Gourmet, The Tonight Show, the Grammy Awards, and numerous Live From Lincoln Center broadcasts and PBS specials. In March 2006, a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions saw Perlman perform live on the 78th Annual Academy Awards telecast, as he performed a medley from the five film scores nominated in the category of Best Original Score. One of his proudest achievements is his collaboration with film score composer John Williams in Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List, for which he performed the soundtrack’s violin solos. He can also be heard as the violin soloist on the soundtrack of Zhang Yimou’s film Hero (music by Tan Dun) and Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (music by John Williams).
 
Perlman’s recordings appear regularly on the best-seller charts and have garnered fifteen Grammy awards. His most recent releases include an all-Mozart recording with the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI), both as soloist and conductor, and a recording for Deutsche Grammophon with Perlman conducting the Israel Philharmonic. In 2004, EMI released The Perlman Edition, a limited-edition 15-CD box set featuring many of his finest EMI recordings as well as newly compiled material. Currently, he records for EMI/Angel, Sony Classical/Sony BMG Masterworks, Deutsche Grammophon, London/Decca, Erato/Elektra International Classics, and Telarc. He appears by arrangement with IMG Artists.
 
Numerous publications and institutions have paid tribute to Itzhak Perlman for the unique place he occupies in the artistic and humanitarian fabric of our times. Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Roosevelt, Yeshiva, and Hebrew universities are among the institutions that have awarded him honorary degrees. Perlman devotes considerable time to education, both in his participation each summer in the Perlman Music Program and his teaching at the Juilliard School, where he holds the Dorothy Richard Starling Foundation Chair. In May 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate and a centennial medal on the occasion of Juilliard’s 100th commencement ceremony.
 
12/07