Itzhak Perlman clapped his hands vigorously, sending the VU meter on my cassette recorder into an epileptic fit. ‘Is it working? Here, let me show you this incredible little mike.’ He produced it, conjurer-like, from a small box which ‘looks like it contains something the doctor gives you a shot out of’ and with evident relish, connected the thimble-sized microphone to the socket on the side of my machine. A further handclap and a characteristically deep, delighted chuckle reassured him that all was well. Perlman’s fascination with audio gadgetry (he would, I’m convinced, have happily spent the half-hour demonstrating the other articles of miniature hi-fl which sat on various surfaces of the hotel room) does, he allows, make him more aware than most recording artists of studio practicabilities. ‘Albeit on an inquisitive amateur level. I am very much interested in sound, and always have been. And you know, it’s amazing that one of the things they still can’t computerize is how to get good sound first shot! They still have to do it by trial and error – which I think is nice. There’s still that little human touch left. And every so often you find a producer coming up with a new recipe. Now there seem to be more and more floor mikes – you can play but don’t move or you get your feet recorded!’

Unlikely to have been taped at floor level, at least as far as the visual side of things is concerned, is EMI’s video recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, made last September with Giulini and the Philharmonia. Predictably fascinated by the venture, Perlman nevertheless admits to feeling a mite daunted by the patience required and the complexity involved. ‘We didn’t have the actual recording sessions filmed – what you see isn’t the same performance as the one on disc. Why? Doesn’t work very well! The film was done at Abbey Road, but not simultaneously. Look at the things that can go wrong with the sound alone. Add lights and cameras and, well, you’re asking for trouble!’

Mention of the cadenza which Perlman plays on the recording (‘the Kreisler – a very clever piece of work, with those trills on the lower strings and the drum rhythm on the higher ones’), prompted talk of the alternatives. I breathed the word Schnittke, whose cadenza with ‘timpani’ beats directed to be tapped on the body of the violin caused several raised eyebrows in a London performance nearly a year ago. The reaction was instantaneous. ‘That! As a matter of fact I have a tape of that very performance here. A friend sent me a cassette of odds and ends which he thought would amuse me, and that was one of them. Never mind this new-light-on-the-concerto-as-a-whole argument. You can’t mix up styles like that.’

Both the Beethoven concerto and the Brahms (also with Giulini, 11/77) were notably (‘and thankfully’) absent from the 22-year-old Perlman’s first group of concerto discs, recorded for RCA within three years of his success at the 1964 Leventritt Competition. Listening to him talk of those first recordings (the concertos were Prokofiev No 2, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, each recently re-made for EMI), it becomes apparent that he now considers them immature, their availability a cause for some regret.

On that early Tchaikovsky disc, as on his more recent recording with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra (12/79), Perlman opens out the traditional cuts in the finale. Not, he explains, as the result of any professorial influence, but because ‘a recording is exactly that: a record of a piece… now if someone’s really adamant that he doesn’t want to hear those bars, then he can put the record on tape, splice the tape, and then he can have both versions in the house! Tomorrow night’ – we were talking in London the day before a Festival Hall performance last June – ‘I’m going to do it with cuts, and if people want it complete, they should buy the record, and then they’ve still got both!’

As unremarkable as those first concerto discs, Perlman claims, was the much-reported appearance on Ed Sullivan’s popular American television show some eight years earlier. ‘I really wasn’t “spotted” on that show; I suspect I was more what they call a “beautiful human interest story”. For me that appearance was the only way of coming to America. Because as you know, after a while you always feel you have to “complete your studies abroad” – around 13 or 14 you begin to get ants in your pants. I don’t believe I was an incredible phenomenon at 13. OK, I was gifted, but it wasn’t one of those abnormal gifts – and genius is an abnormality, whether it’s a good or a bad one. In my case it was a healthy talent, and not out of context to the rest of my life; the teachers I’ve had have helped to see to that, too.’

Teaching, which occupied a little of Perlman’s time until three or four years ago, nowadays tends to take the form of masterclasses – just a few, for it is a method of learning he openly admits to distrust. ‘I don’t really like them. Bring the public in, and it’s immediately a performance. Now that’s OK for a one-off thing. It’s nice for entertainment, and nice for the audience who may gain a bit of insight into what goes on, but I soon feel unable to say everything I want to say – it’s a really nerve-racking experience for the students. OK it’s a positive one in some ways (you’d never play in a more tense situation, not even at a competition), but usually these masterclasses turn out no better than a teacher having to say ‘No, no, do it this way’. And he either ends up saying too much (incomprehensible), or too little (boring to watch, tense to play under). OK if something gets better, the teacher’s a big virtuoso and a hero – ‘Look, I helped you to do this in five minutes!’ Who needs that? It’s so unreal. And nobody’s relaxed.’

Everyone, by contrast, positively exuded relaxation in the recent BBC 1 programme ‘André Previn and Friends’ – not least Perlman himself, whether trying out a bar or two of the Sibelius Concerto or, in the next instant, a snatch of Copland’s ‘Hoe-down’, straightaway joined by Previn. Violinist, pianist and the other friends in question (Shelly Manne, Jim Hall and Red Mitchell) were rehearsing in Pittsburgh between takes for their second jazz record ‘It’s a Breeze’. ‘I felt really privileged to be able to do repertoire which is so “foreign” to what I usually do. The style, the improvisation necessary really made me see the artists in a new light – the easy way in rehearsal that one person would pick up the drift of someone else’s thinking just from one syllable. That was terrifying for someone who’d not done any jazz before’, judging by Perlman’s instant, good-humoured responses on the TV programme, it seems that he caught on with unusual rapidity.

‘They’d have an eight-bar phrase, a set of chords, and off they go. And to record like that is incredible, because you don’t, you can’t, have to worry about editing. You just do a piece, and if you don’t like it you do it again. And then you choose. Nobody else picks up the pieces and puts the album together for you!’ I had been particularly intrigued by the title of one of the tracks on the first disc – Previn’s Who reads reviews? Was it, I wondered, a sentiment close to its composer’s heart? Perlman neatly side-stepped that one. ‘Oh, André has a real style for these titles! You should see the second album – there are things like Catgut your tongue, Pearl before swine, and It’s a Breeze, of course’.

As if the jazz disc were not reason enough to spend a week of sessions in Pittsburgh, Perlman stayed on to record a coupling of the Korngold and Conus concertos with Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (‘every time I play the Korngold – wonderful piece – I can see the boat sailing into the sunset, just as it did in the Erroll Flynn movie The Prince and the Pauper’). Also to come – and also from EMI – are discs of Shostakovich’s First Concerto and, with Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, both of Prokofiev’s. For Deutsche Grammophon Perlman has recorded Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and the Elgar Concerto, the latter with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Daniel Barenboim is the conductor on both. ‘I think it’s the first disc of the Elgar to use a non-British orchestra. Just wait till you hear the sound they make at the start!’ Plans are also afoot to record two concertos written for him by Robert Starr and the Korean Earl Kim – ‘very lightly-textured music, oriental and lyrical.’ Are there tunes? ‘Oh yes!’ (the tone implied, pleasantly, ‘Of course there are tunes’).

The Korngold and Conus concertos are, Perlman happily admits, Heifetz specialities. ‘It took an awful lot of guts to make that record. You ask me who my idols are. Kreisler, of course, Milstein and Heifetz. It was Heifetz’s 80th birthday last March, and I volunteered to do some radio shows – as a DJ playing his records! It was the greatest fun having to choose these discs and then just drool over them!’ It must have been the greatest fun to listen, too.

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