I play, I conduct, and I teach, so I’m having a good time,” observes Itzhak Perlman. Of course, when the violin virtuoso uses the word play , that’s an understatement.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1945, Perlman debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 17. Today, he’s one of the world’s best known and most honored classical musicians, often described as a “superstar.” He’s garnered four Emmy Awards and 15 Grammy Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

At age three, Perlman heard a concert on the radio and asked his father for a violin. Months later, he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. He walks with crutches and performs while seated. Throughout his career, he’s maintained a rigorous travel schedule, appearing at venues far beyond the concert halls of the United States and Western Europe. In 1987, he joined a groundbreaking tour with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Hungary and Poland, and three years later performed in the orchestra’s first concert in the Soviet Union. He toured China and India in 1994.

Perlman’s instrument of choice is the Soil Stradivarius violin, made in 1714. He enjoys the “social” aspect – the portability – of stringed instruments, he says. While conceding the tremendous repertoire of the piano, he jokes that if you want to play one, “you have to go where there is a piano.”

Perlman doesn’t always don formalwear for his performances; he’s comfortable bantering with David Letterman and has appeared on Sesame Street . He was also a soloist on the Oscar-winning score of Schindler’s List by John Williams and played at the Academy Awards.

Along with performing, another aspect of Perlman’s self-described “three-pronged” musical career is conducting. He has wielded the baton with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Symphony, among others.

But teaching holds a special attraction. He and his wife, Toby, founded the Perlman Music Program in 1993. Seven years later, they purchased an old 28-acre resort and made it into a campus on the shore of Shelter Island, N.Y., USA. (When the wind is right, the sound of music carries across the channel to Long Island’s North Fork.)

Between tours, Perlman teaches at the Juilliard School in New York, where he and his wife studied violin, and during the summer at Shelter Island.

On 2 December, he will perform at the Concert to End Polio with the New York Philharmonic, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. All proceeds will go to Rotary’s US$200 Million Challenge.

Journalist Warren Kalbacker recently caught up with Perlman before he was off to a favorite evening engagement: meeting with students.

The Rotarian: You appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, several years before the Beatles, and at a young age. What has that achievement meant to you?

Itzhak Perlman: I’m very thankful. The Ed Sullivan Show brought me to the States and led to my scholarship at the Juilliard School. I was a little 13-year-old kid walking with crutches. People have a tendency to look at a youngster with a disability and not listen to what they have to offer. They ask whether that person can really have a career and withstand the rigors of travel and so on. I had to fight that. I had to face a lot of people who did not have the proper attitude, which is, “Forget about the disability. Let’s hear what the person has to say musically and then make a decision.”

TR: Did the violin choose Itzhak Perlman?

Perlman: Absolutely. I liked the sound. If you were to ask people in a symphony orchestra why they’re playing a particular instrument, they would say it’s the sound that attracted them. It’s magnetic. We’ve got someone in our teaching program who wanted to play the bass all her life. Why would that sound attract her and not the sound of a violin or cello? It’s something in our makeup.

TR: Deep down, don’t we all need music?

Perlman: We do. In difficult times, people just like to hear music. They like to be moved by what they hear. And music speaks different languages. If you go to China or India or Africa, you will find that music is the language of that particular country or continent. But even in countries where the music is different, there is always Western classical music. It’s more international.

TR: You performed in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Do musicians and orchestras make effective diplomats?

Perlman: Always. You might have unresolved issues, but culture is always the first step toward warmer relations between countries. And, of course, the relations between governments rarely have anything to do with the people. They come to a concert hall to listen to the Israel Philharmonic or to listen to me, a native Israeli. They don’t listen because of state issues. They listen to the music, and they get enthusiastic – and that’s the important thing.

TR: Next month, you will perform with the New York Philharmonic at the Concert to End Polio, benefiting Rotary International’s push to end the disease forever. Can you share some program notes?

Perlman: I just chose nice music. [ laughs ] I’m playing a Max Bruch violin concerto. In the second half, I may do the theme from Schindler’s List , and then a piece by Fritz Kreisler for violin and orchestra.

TR: Why did you agree to perform this benefit concert?

Perlman: For me, the issue is black and white. The fact that there’s still polio is ridiculous. There’s absolutely no excuse for anyone to get polio. This has to be dealt with immediately. I’m not totally versed in inoculation issues, and obviously there are certain countries where inoculation is not quite as organized and there is resistance. But you have to do this. It’s a very humane thing.

TR: When you hear a young person described as a musical prodigy, what comes to mind?

Perlman: Being described as a prodigy is all bad: “My God, this person is a freak.” Very talented is a more appropriate term. There are few real prodigies. Mozart was a prodigy. To be talented at an early age can be a blessing, but to have such a gift is an abnormality. The goal of every “child prodigy” at the age of 10 is to survive the years of being abnormal. You can listen to someone who sounds extremely promising, and then four or five years later you hear nothing there. You can call it burnout. I’ve heard a lot of extremely talented young people. And then something happened. Parents pushed too hard. Or there was bad teaching or a bad attitude. Teaching is all about letting the gift develop itself without messing with it. The promise has to be extended throughout the teenage years.

TR: What is most important to impart as a teacher?

Perlman: It’s important to have a nurturing attitude. I had three teachers. My first teacher, a Russian in Israel, would tell me what to do and was a bit abusive. She worked at trying to make me feel guilty if I didn’t practice. I had two teachers at Juilliard: Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay. Galamian was similar to my first teacher. He had a system: “If you do what I say, you’ll be able to play the violin. If you don’t, you won’t.” But when I would play something for DeLay, she’d ask me what I thought of it. She included me in the process of teaching. I did not like it at the time. But it’s funny: This is the way I teach. I include the students. Even if a student plays badly, there’s always something that’s good there, and from talking about that, you can fix the faults. A lot of old-fashioned people believe that hitting you over the head is good for you. That’s not in the language of the faculty at our program. You have to be kind and constructive.  

TR: So you didn’t like to practice any more than the rest of us who’ve studied an instrument?

Perlman: As a child, I hated to practice. But practicing is an art; it’s not just about putting in the time. A lot of kids are too young to immediately get that. They say, well, I’m going to do my four or five hours a day, and I’m going to keep repeating everything, and it’s going to be good. And sometimes they wonder why it’s not working. You need to organize practice; you need a goal. You need to ask yourself, “Why am I practicing, and what is it for?” You can practice for sound, for intonation, for facility, or a lot of other things, but it’s got to be organized. And sometimes the repetition without thinking can be counterproductive. If you practice something wrong – without knowing it – then you have to undo it by practicing even more. I tell the kids that if you practice slowly and with a brain, you will save a lot of time. You can accomplish in an hour what could take a week.

TR: You’ve played at the Oscars. You’ve played with jazz great Oscar Peterson. Recount a favorite unexpected venue or collaboration.

Perlman: Playing with Oscar Peterson was a blast. Classical musicians do not improvise like jazz people. I was in awe of his artistry. We chose pieces that were standards, and the reason was that I felt that harmonically, I would be very familiar with them. But we would do one take, and he would do the piece, and on the next take he would improvise, and it would really be a different piece. He felt so comfortable with what he was doing. It was amazing.

TR: Does klezmer, secular Jewish folk music, provide you with an outlet for improvisation?

Perlman: It all depends, because there are some klezmer tunes that you just play, and with the others, the improvisation is a little subtler than jazz. I always like to call it Jewish soul music. I enjoy doing it. You associate klezmer with the clarinet or violin as a solo instrument, but klezmer started with whatever instrument was available. We just had a klezmer band at our daughter’s wedding. They had trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. And you can add other instruments. They have licks there, but for me, jazz is built for improvisation. That’s part of the virtuosity of the players.

TR: You’ve made more than one appearance on late-night television. Do you remain dedicated to bringing classical music out of the concert hall?

Perlman: I don’t care whether they’re sitting in the audience at The Tonight Show or in Carnegie Hall – people appreciate it when they hear quality. At Carnegie or Avery Fisher Hall [at Lincoln Center], the percentage of people who have a familiarity with classical music is larger, but I have a lot of trust in the audience. I’ve done Johnny Carson as well as PBS. There is no reason not to expose everyone to classical music.

TR: You’ve performed and recorded music written for the violin from every important composer over the last 400 years, from Antonio Vivaldi to Alban Berg. What is it about the instrument that has attracted such lasting interest?

Perlman: The range of the instrument is very attractive. The violin accommodates the range, sound, and the player’s ability to do what composers throughout the ages have demanded, depending on whether the music is baroque, romantic, classical. A lot of composers’ demands have to do with the usage of the bow. Others have to do with rhythm and harmony. We’re doing a chamber music program now, and one of the pieces is Bartók. His demand on the violin is certainly different from Vivaldi’s.

TR: Can you deconstruct the violin – wood, strings, varnish, all put together in a magical way?

Perlman: They were during Strad’s time. There are a lot of good makers now, but some of the old Italian violins are pretty amazing. Today it’s very difficult to find fine Italian instruments without spending a fortune. The only way for kids to have an opportunity to play those instruments is if they’re on loan from a foundation or society. Sometimes people share in buying an instrument, and then they loan it to a talented young violinist.

TR: What is the future of the violin? Will composers look to the instrument over the next few centuries as they’ve done in the past?

Perlman: I see the future, and it’s good because the level of playing has risen among the students I’m exposed to. We will see about composers. Everything has reached a plateau. There was no harmony, and now we’re going back to harmony with different rhythms. I’ve played some new compositions, but not recently. I’ve had a couple of pieces written for me by a wonderful composer named Earl Kim, a student of Arnold Schönberg. He wrote me a violin concerto, which I recorded with the Boston Symphony. I have played a couple of pieces that were written for me, but you could not describe me as somebody who champions contemporary music full time. Every now and then I play it, but I still feel I haven’t done justice to the old stuff.

TR: After the applause and the encores, what’s it all about for Itzhak Perlman?

Perlman: What I am going to eat. I cook, but I am not a cook. There is a difference. I wouldn’t even begin to think about trying to do something a real fancy French restaurant would do. But I cook fairly well. I can get excited about all sorts of ethnic foods. I have a 15-year-old asparagus patch at my home in East Hampton. And in the garden, we have tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and zucchini. One of the counselors at the camp, a wonderful bass player, is a mushroom fanatic, and she picked mushrooms from Shelter Island. We ate them, and they were wonderful. And I’m still here.

TR: Once and for all, what is the difference between a fiddle and a violin?

Perlman: When somebody’s terrific, classical musicians say, “He’s some fancy fiddler.” But the violin and fiddle are the same. Really.

Warren Kalbacker is a freelance writer based in New York City.

• To buy tickets, phone the Philharmonic box office at 212-875-5656 (10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays) and mention that you're a Rotarian so you can access the block of tickets reserved for Rotarians until 1 November.
  

• Tickets also can be purchased online through the Philharmonic, but they are not part of the Rotary ticket block. Tickets are expected to go quickly. All proceeds will benefit Rotary's US$200 Million Challenge .

• If you can't attend the concert, donate online now to help eradicate polio . Help promote this special event by placing an ad in your club or district newsletter or on its Web site.

• Download graphics and learn more at www.rotary.org/endpolioconcert .