Itzhak Perlman "Our job is to make music with what remains"

Itzhak Perlman with the Filarmónica de la Ciudad de Praga performing Cinema Paradiso in the Bicentennial Park of Vitacura, Santiago, Chile on 18/11/2010

Itzhak Perlman, born in Tel Aviv on 31 August 1945, is an Israeli-American violinist, conductor, and music teacher. Over the course of his career, Itzhak 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 the Presidential Inauguration of President Obama. He has conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Westchester Philharmonic. In 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.


At the age of three, he was denied admission to the Shulamit Conservatory 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, where he gave his first recital at age 10.


Itzhak contracted polio at age four and has walked using leg braces and crutches since then. As of 2018, he uses crutches or an electric Amigo scooter for mobility and plays the violin while seated.

Itzhak has been a soloist for a number of film scores among them the theme of the 1993 film Schindler's List by John Williams, which subsequently won an Academy Award for Best Original Score. More recently, he was the violin soloist for the 2005 film Memoirs of a Geisha along with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Perlman played selections from the musical scores of the movies nominated for "Best Original Score" at the 73rd Academy Awards with Yo-Yo Ma and at the 78th Academy Awards.

During a concert one of his violin strings broke when he was only a few bars into a piece. He didn’t stop, but closed his eyes and carried on playing one of his greatest ever master performances with passion and power, unlike anything any of his audiences had ever heard, refusing to be constrained by the 3 strings he had to play with. When asked about his performance after the thunderous applause had died down he replied, 
"Our job is to make music with what remains". 

Ed Sullivan congratulates 13-year-old Itzhak Perlman after a concert (1958)

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