Itzhak Perlman

Itzhak Perlman Hebrew ???? ????? born August 31 1945 is an IsraeliAmerican 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 Obamas 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 mid1930s 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 BuchmannMehta School of Music where he gave his first recital at age 10 He moved to the US 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 Puccinis 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 Philharmonics 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 firstever 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 CCBYSA 30