Itzhak Perlman Discusses Child Prodigies and Handicap Access

By PIA LINDSTROM

In the movie "Shine," a teacher warns a young musician to watch out for the Rach 3: "It's dangerous!" The Rach 3 is not a pterodactyl, it's Rachmaninoff's treacherously difficult Piano Concerto, No. 3. In this movie based on the Australian child prodigy David Helfgott, the young musician has a breakdown and spends years in a mental institution after tackling the Rach 3.

Itzhak Perlman, the violinist who has a home on the East End, was host at a benefit screening of "Shine" at the East Hampton Cinema for the Hamptons Summer Music School, which is run by his wife, Toby Perlman.

Q. Can music make you crazy?

A. So many things can drive you mad as a child, not only music. This particular case was a very extreme situation. But it's not just musicians, it's tennis players, everybody. Any gifted child can potentially get in real trouble because of the way they are handled. I always say an unusual talent is an abnormality because kids don't have talents like that, not your average child. You're open for great dangers. You've got so many things that can go wrong.

No. 1, parents. What is the agenda of a parent? Do they want their child to be successful, or do they want to have success through their child? For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard about them.

Q. Is it possible that struggling with the complexity of the music, as this boy does in the film, triggers something in the brain?

A. I disagree with that. I think the music was just the vehicle, it became a challenge. He was obviously capable of playing it. The point was that the father wanted to keep the child. He did not want to let him explore, go into the world and study with other people without his blessing.

Some people are stronger than others. You can handle people with kid gloves and sometimes they just go ahead and say, "I will do it, despite it." But I feel that you always pay when you are a child. You have a particular set of circumstances where you start playing concerts early on. You always hear about all these kids -- and these days they are getting younger and younger -- and you hear things such as: "Ah! What a wonderful kid, and totally normal, going to school. He has friends." Baloney! You always pay for it.

You don't pay now, you pay later. Rarely do you see people survive, and that's the goal, to survive your gift. Especially when the gift is given to a youngster who doesn't necessarily deserve that gift.

I listen to kids play a lot. People say to me, "This is a wonderful, blah blah, great, fantastic," and I say, "O.K." So I listen.

Sometimes I listen to somebody who is, I don't know, 10, 11, 12, and when I hear that person sounds like a child, I say, "Thank God," because that's good. If you close your eyes and say, "That's a kid, but with talent," that's great. But if you close your eyes and say, "Oh my God, that's like someone 25 years old," that's dangerous. There's nothing you can do. You can't say, "Well, it's bad to have talent." But, it's a fact, if somebody has that, then they have a lot more problems.

Q. In the movie, they say the Rach 3 is "too passionate, too dangerous; he's too young," as though it were sex, or driving a fast car.

A. It's a part of development. When you are 8 or 9, you should have a childhood. You should have adolescence. You should go through everything in a normal way. It's very difficult, unless somebody is exceptionally unusual. It's very interesting that in math most mathematical geniuses were working at a very early age, a teen-ager, and then afterwards it's just gone.

Q. Math and music are related?

A. In a way. But if you play mathematically, it's not very good.

Q. Are you good at math?

A. No! In our family, we call it the "Perlman math curse." Only two of our kids are good at math. The rest have what my wife terms, "the regular Perlman math situation," which is, "What's THAT?"

Q. How did you survive your talent?

A. Who knows if I did! But it is a fact that at the age of 8 I sounded like a reasonably talented 8-year-old. When I came to the United States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 13-year-old and I played a Mendelsohn Concerto and it sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But id did not sound like a finished product.

Q. Why were people so taken with you?

A. They weren't taken with me.

Q. You were considered a child prodigy.

A. No, I wasn't. I'll tell you why.

Q. You mean, now you're considered a child prodigy.

A. Yes. Now: He was a child prodigy. But a child prodigy is somebody that can step up to the stage of Carnegie Hall and play with an orchestra one of the standard violin concertos with aplomb. I couldn't do that! I can name you five people who could do that at the age of 10 or 11. And did. Not five, maybe three. But I couldn't do that. At that age I showed a lot of promise. People said, "Ach! Come on, you can see that he has a beautiful sound, he has some musicianship." But it was all in the frame of the child. It was not one of those things that you cannot believe. There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at that age. I wasn't, thank God.

My playing was good, it showed promise, and then I came to Juilliard and I studied until I was 18. When you think about what the child prodigies are playing these days! The minute someone shows promise, they get management. They play 20, 30, 40 50 concerts a year. I couldn't do that. So I studied at Juilliard and at the age of 18 I won the Leventritt Prize and then, from the age of 19, I started to play on a professional level. At benefits for Jewish organizations. I would play 10 minutes at a UJA function at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Q. It's interesting that there are few young Israeli musicians today and many young Asians.

A. It's a cycle. There used to be a lot, and now it's going the other way. When you think about the Juilliard School, there are a lot of Asians. There are fiddle players from China, Japan; 40 per cent.

Q. Why is that?

A. It's a hunger for music. It's the ability for discipline. You achieve great form, great results.

Q. How important is a teacher?

A. Very. I think a teacher should be your musical guide and your personal guide. In the musician, there is a tendency to have a narrowness. It's all compartmentalized. I am playing the violin, that's all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

I had an ideal teacher, and I had two, Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, and she was an all-around kind of teacher. She would look for what else you do, besides the violin. Do you go to concerts? Do you go to operas? Do you go to museums? Are you a broad sort of a person?

Q. But don't you have to have an obsession? Wouldn't a child have to be somewhat obsessive by nature?

A. Could be a little bit.

Q. How else would you practice for eight hours a day, unless you have an obsessive streak?

A. I don't practice eight hours a day. I practiced eight hours, three days. Eight hours a day, forget about it! Eight hours a day doesn't do any good.

Q. What is the ideal amount of practice?

A. The ideal amount would be between four and five hours. I never practiced more than about three. It depends on the gift, depends on the talent. After five hours, it becomes useless. A lot of kids put in all those hours. After a while, it actually hurts you. It becomes counterproductive. You can't absorb any more. It's like a sponge. A sponge has that much absorbent capability and after a while you can pour water over it and nothing stays.

Q. In this film, they portray the competition as almost like Rocky going into the ring. He's got to dominate his instrument and he sweats. Is it that physical?

A. Competition can be the most nerve-racking experience. Some people just thrive on it. I don't remember being as nervous as when I entered that final round. I just didn't know where I was. I was saying, "Oh yeah, I think I'm in Carnegie Hall, here." The adrenaline was so overpowering.

Q. It must be like actors when they forget the scene and they make it up. The other musicians must go crazy.

A. It was maybe 20 years ago when we were doing a piece and all of a sudden the conductor started to clear his throat in the middle of the concert, "cough, cough," and I said to myself, why is he clearing his throat? We are playing music here and he's clearing his throat? I looked at him and he was sort of giving me a funny sign, like, what's going on? Then I realized that I was actually at the end of the movement instead of at the beginning. I just started and then I was finished already! SO I just made up a couple of little things and then we went back.

Q. I talked to you years ago when you first got involved with changes in the architecture for handicapped people who travel. Are things better?

A. Every now and then there is a little improvement, but it is still not working. When you think about the American's With Disabilities Act, you go on the street and you say, "Where is the A.D.A.? Where is it?!" This machine, the wheelchair, I can go all over the place, but you need a place without stairs to get in.

It's so easy, the store has to put a little ramp in there and I can come in. The concept of access sometimes escapes people. Access means getting to a place where everybody else gets to, whether it's a concert hall, so you don't have to go through the back, you don't have to make special calls to warn them of your arrival.

Just recently I went to an airport and I asked for a wheelchair. There were three of us in wheelchairs and only two porters, so the guy just took two of us at the same time. I cannot tell you how humiliating that is. It's like letting them take two suitcases. They are very skillful, but I feel like: What is this? Then I say to myself, either I do that or I have to wait an extra 20 minutes until he brings the other person. These things still happen. Sometimes the wheelchairs don't arrive, sometimes the chairs are broken, there's only one leg rest, and they say, "Well, that's the only chair we have." There's an awful lot that's not being done. But let's hope that if we talk about it long enough, someone will make it improve at a faster pace. Right now, it's difficult out there.

My favorite experience is in Paris. They have special wheelchairs that go through every doorway. Even if the doorway is slightly narrow, the wheelchairs are narrow. They don't change the doorways, they change the wheelchairs and to hell with the people! If someone weighs a couple more pounds, that's it! You sit in the chair, you go like that. [He hunches his body.] It's very uncomfortable.

Q. You teach at the Hamptons Music School?

A. Let me tell you about the Hamptons Music School. I have nothing to do with the system. This is my wife's thing, and it's a wonderful school. It is a school for pre-college kids. We have about 35 kids, piano, violin, cello, and general music. That's her dream and it's been her dream all along. She's got a concept about what it is to go to a music camp and the horrible things that happen. She tries to take those away.

They practice in a concentrated way, but they are having a good time. I know some camps where the pressure is so tremendous that it's almost a horrible experience. Sometimes you have it so laid back that nobody does any work. She has got the combination of doing the work, but then going to the beach and having a good time and playing Ping-Pong, or swimming, or whatever.

My job is nothing. I just happen to be there. I'm available if somebody comes and says, "What's-her-name has the Brahms violin concerto and she's having a little problem in the first movement, could you hear?" I listen to them.

There's a little orchestra there, so I wave my arms and start them off and we have a nice time. It's fun.

Q. Actors say that if you lose your concentration for a split second, stage fright comes in. Is that true in music? You start to say to yourself, I wonder how this sounds?

A. If you doubt yourself...that's the worst! You can have things like, you probably have the same thing with acting, "What's the next line?" You'll forget it!

A lot of what happens is a lack of trust. Let's say you have a concerto to play and you practice it a lot and you know it. You know everything about it. You've done the correct way of practicing it, slowly. The first time you play it, you will be nervous. It's the same with acting, or with anything that you do for the first time. You're not aware how nerves are going to affect you. You get more nervous in front of a lot of people. That's why, when you play a concerto, you play with a small orchestra, in some place where you don't feel that it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in. If you don't trust, then you're going to have a problem.

Trust your ability. Let's say a technical passage has to do with building up a bunch of chains. You have a pattern. The patterns are in your brain. If you start to concentrate on what makes these patterns, you may just listen to those patters. They might get lost, so that's where trust comes in. It's like speaking a sentence and not thinking of every word. You have to concentrate on how you are going to say it, what you want to convey, but you aren't going to say, "This is the first word, this is the second word, and this is the third." It's the same thing with music.

Q. That's something one would have to give a student? The confidence to trust?

A. The confidence and the sense of enjoyment and the ability to look at the music and say, this is so wonderful. The ability to enjoy the music. When you hear some of the students in the school, it is fantastic. Some of the questions are so wonderful, so insightful. For example, we showed some videos, and the musicians were fairly immobile. One comment was, Isn't it interesting how without moving, they were able to play music in such a way that they moved a person emotionally. They didn't need to go through all those physical machinations. So sometimes you get from the mouth of kids wonderful things.

Q. Are all your children musicians of various sorts?

A. Four out of the five are either interested or doing it for money. My oldest daughter is a pianist, she plays concerts, we play together, also.

Q. No child prodigies here?

A. Thank God, no. Child prodigy is a curse because, like we saw in the movie, you've got all those terrible possibilities.