Itzhak Perlman and his go-to accompanist Rohan De Silva return to Centennial Hall on Wednesday, Jan. 11, nine years after they played their last UA Presents concert in 2008.
Fun fact: That concert nearly a decade ago came 24 hours after another great violinist, Joshua Bell, joined the Tucson Symphony Orchestra at Tucson Music Hall. Two of the world's greatest violinists just miles and hours apart in, of all places, Tucson!
Perlman has been back here once since then, playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the TSO in 2014 in what was his first concert with the orchestra in 30 years.
He returns with De Silva, who he has performed with for years. The pair have an interesting dynamic, like brothers who finish one-another's sentences, or know exactly where to throw the ball so that the other will catch it.ย At the end of that sold-out UA Presents concert, Perlman and De Silva returned for an encore with a stack of scores and a computer printoutย presumably of every work that Perlman had ever performed in a career that went back some 40, 50 years. He flipped through the list, quipping about the difficulty of some pieces and his less-than-love-affair for others, before he settled on Nicolo Paganini's "Perpetual Motion" as arranged by famed violinist Fritz Kreisler.
Here's how we remembered that encore performance, form our 2008 : "It's an extremely virtuosic and demanding piece. The player alternates bowing and finger play at lightening speed.Perlman plucked at the strings so fast and so precisely that each created a distinct note separate from the next. It was genius."
Perlman returns with a program that includes Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Major, No. 5 "Spring"; and Schumann's "Fantasiestรผcke," as well Vivaldi's A Major Sonata and Stravinsky's Suite Italienne for Violin and Piano.
Tickets are $20-$145 here.ย
