Violin great Perlman gives Tucson audience night to remember

Itzhak Perlman had a question for his Tucson Symphony Orchestra audience Thursday night: Who starred in the 1954 film “Sabrina”?

From the darkened hall, somewhere in the middle of the orchestra section, a man shouted out, “Humphrey Bogart.” A woman closer to the stage chimed in, “Audrey Hepburn.”

OK, Perlman responded.

Next question: Who starred in the 1995 redux of “Sabrina”?

He scanned the darkened Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. No answer.

TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez raised his hand: “Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond,” he blurted out.

Perlman gave him a quizzical look.

“I Wikipediaed it,” the conductor confessed with a shrug, and the 79-year-old Perlman, sitting in his motorized scooter a few feet from Gomez’s podium, burst out laughing.

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Yes, the world’s greatest living violinist was laughing and telling jokes in the improbable setting of an orchestra concert.

Which is what made the TSO’s “An Evening at the Movies with Itzhak Perlman” feel more like “An Evening at Home with Itzhak Perlman.”

In between impeccably performing music from more than a half-dozen great films with the orchestra — from his signature “Schindler’s List,” the ubiquitous “As Time Goes By” from “Casablanca” and the Love Theme from “Cinema Paradiso,” to the wonderful “Por una cabeza” tango from “Scent of A Woman,” John Williams’s dramatically virtuosic theme from “Far and Away” and John Barry’s sweeping main title from “Out of Africa” that so vividly painted the picture of Kenya — Perlman interacted with the audience in a way we’d never experienced before.

He cracked jokes, asked us questions and made us feel like Music Hall was his living room and we were spending 45 minutes with an old friend.

It was even more special for Gomez, who idolized Perlman when he was a teen playing violin in Venezuela’s renowned El Sistema music program. In his two-plus decades conducting, Thursday was the first time he worked with Perlman.

Gomez’s excitement was evident from his ear-to-ear smile that never waned and the time he blushed when Perlman asked him who starred in “Cinema Paradiso” and Gomez answered, incorrectly, “A bunch of Italians?”

“For me, it’s like seeing a little bit of a piece of the heaven up close,” he said earlier this week. “I grew up seeing this man. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna be sitting there in front of me. Wow’.”

Gomez and the orchestra opened the first half of Thursday’s concert with classical works used in films, including Verdi’s Overture to his opera “La Forza del Destino” used in the 1986 French film “Jean de Florette”; Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker” featured in Disney’s “Fantasia”; Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” that served as the opening theme of the 1950s-60s TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”; and piano great Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 performed by that Rascally Rabbit Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes classic “Rhapsody Rabbit.”