Itzhak Perlman | WatchedThis
Itzhak Perlman
Acting
Biography
Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-American violinist, conductor, and music teacher. Perlman has performed worldwide, and throughout the United States, in venues that have included a State Dinner at the White House honoring Queen Elizabeth II, and at President Barack Obama's inauguration. He has conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Westchester Philharmonic. In 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has received 16 Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Emmy Awards. Perlman was born in 1945 in Tel Aviv. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were Jewish natives of Poland and had independently emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) in the mid-1930s before they met and later married. Perlman contracted polio at age four and has walked using leg braces and crutches since then and plays the violin while seated. As of 2018, he uses crutches or an electric Amigo scooter for mobility. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied admission to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv (now the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music), where he gave his first recital at age 10. He moved to the U.S. at age 13 to study at the Juilliard School with the violin teacher Ivan Galamian and his assistant Dorothy DeLay. Perlman appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show twice in 1958, and again in 1964, on the same show with the Rolling Stones. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1963 and won the Leventritt Competition in 1964. Soon afterward, he began to tour widely. In addition to an extensive recording and performance career, he has continued to make appearances on television shows such as The Tonight Show and Sesame Street as well as playing at a number of White House functions. Although Perlman has never been billed or marketed as a singer, he sang the role of "Un carceriere" ("a jailer") on a 1981 EMI recording of Puccini's "Tosca" that featured Renata Scotto, Plácido Domingo, and Renato Bruson, with James Levine conducting. He had earlier sung the role in an excerpt from the opera on a 1980 Pension Fund Benefit Concert telecast as part of the Live from Lincoln Center series with Luciano Pavarotti as Cavaradossi and Zubin Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic. On July 5, 1986, Perlman performed at the New York Philharmonic's tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, which was televised live on ABC. The orchestra, conducted by Mehta, performed in Central Park. In 1987, Perlman joined the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) for its concerts in Warsaw and Budapest as well as other cities in Eastern bloc countries. He toured with the IPO in the spring of 1990 for its first-ever performance in the Soviet Union, with concerts in Moscow and Leningrad, and again in 1994, performing in China and India. ... Source: Article "Itzhak Perlman" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Small Wonders
A dedicated music teacher in East Harlem instructs a gaggle of underprivileged children in the art of the violin. In the climax, they play Carnegie Hall with some of the world's foremost fiddlers.
Perlman in Russia
This documentary follows Itzhak Perlman when he travelled to Russia for the first time in 1991, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. Perlman describes his experiences with wit and warmth, and speaks movingly of what it means to him, as a Jew, to perform in Russia with a Jewish orchestra.
Orchestra of Exiles
The suspenseful chronicle of how the prodigious Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman helped save Europe’s premiere Jewish musicians from obliteration by the Nazis during World War II. In three years, he transformed from a world renowned violinist to a humanitarian racing against time.
Here Today
Veteran comedy writer Charlie Berns, who is slowly but surely losing his grip on reality, befriends a talented young New York street singer Emma Payge. Together, they form an unlikely yet hilarious and touching friendship that kicks the generation gap aside and redefines the meaning of love and trust.
Fantasia 2000
Blending lively music and brilliant animation, this sequel to the original 'Fantasia' restores 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and adds seven new shorts.
Beethoven - Choral Fantasy and Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello & Piano
The music is not Beethoven's most familiar, but it is absolutely charming. The concerto is appealing in its melodic material and the intricate interactions among the soloists and orchestra. The Choral Fantasy features a long piano solo that Beethoven wrote for himself, plus a choral melody that sounds like a preliminary sketch for the last movement of his Ninth Symphony. Both works pose unusual balance challenges, to which Barenboim and the recording engineers rise impressively.
A Tribute to Victor Borge
"A Tribute Victor Borge" celebrates the life and work of the beloved international humorist and musician. Victor Borge was born in Copenhagen in 1909 into a musical family.He was a child prodigy and began his perfrming carreer at a very early age. For more than eight decades, he has never been out of the spotlight.
The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow
The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow is a film which sets out to bring the viewer closer, not to the details of Schubert's life, but to the spirit of what he was trying to express with what he called his creative gift and with which he tried "to brighten the world". The film begins with the funeral of Beethoven, at which Schubert was a torch-bearer, His story is told almost entirely in music written in the twenty months that remained to him after that date, together with quotations from Schubert's letters, diaries and the words that he chose to set in some of his songs. Includes personal introductions by Christopher Nupen and Jacqueline du Pré and features the legendary 1969 performance of The Trout with Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Jacqueline du Pré, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta.
The Trout
Christopher Nupen's record of the concert given by five young musicians in the new Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's South Bank, in 1969. The Trout is an exuberant explosion of youthful enjoyment in music: first from Schubert himself, who wrote his famous Trout quintet when he was 22 years old, and then from five young artists of the highest rank. They pick up the spirit of Schubert's music magnificently, both in preparation and rehearsal, and in their 1969 performance of the work, which has become one of the most remembered ever given. Includes personal introductions by Christopher Nupen and Jacqueline du Pré and features the legendary 1969 performance of The Trout with Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Jacqueline du Pré, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta.
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