Hurley's Journal

Itzhak Perlman

I am not a big concert goer.  I’ve never been to the Walnut Creek ampitheater (or whatever it’s called now) in Raleigh, the city where I have lived for the past 15 years.  The last big-name rock star I saw in concert (out of a total of two in my lifetime) was Eric Clapton.

In 1975.

But when I heard the man on the radio say Itzhak Perlman was coming to play Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto with the North Carolina Symphony in May of this year, I ran out and bought two tickets right away.  I was not disappointed.

Dan Rather once said that the definition of an intellectual, in the Texas town where he grew up, was someone who could hear the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.  I fail the test every time.  And on the evening of May 15, at the Meymandi Concert Hall in Raleigh, even the symphony’s impeccable performance of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, in the run-up to Perlman taking the stage, could not suppress my mental image of Jack Lemmon humming while making spaghetti for Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment.  My apologies, Mr. Tchaikovsky, but director Billy Wilder knew how to pick ‘em.

For anyone uninitiated as I, who learned this from the program materials, it should be noted that Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto is not for the faint of heart.  It is said to be technically daunting even to the most gifted of professional violinists.  Watching Maestro Perlman play it, I could see why.  Yet he played it perfectly and (it seemed) effortlessly.  I leaned over to Susan, at one point, and said, “You’re watching the equivalent of someone taking one three-point shot after another and never missing.”  You’ll watch a lot of Knicks games without ever seeing that kind of talent.

Itzhak Perlman is a genius and an inspiration, but even the cognoscenti who came to a sold-out house to hear him play that night would not have said that he is a god.  No, that honor goes to another.

It was 1972, and in the opinion of my aunt and uncle (who obviously were clueless), having me tag along with my 15-year old cousin Jordie when he went to Puerto Rico to stay with his father was a good way to keep Jordie out of trouble.  It was quite the other way around.

Jordie was a handsome kid, and this had not escaped the notice of young girls in San Juan during the summers he had spent there.  When he returned in the summer of 1972, with me by his side, clutching the Spanish-English dictionary my father had given me, we set out to find a particular, blonde-haired Spanish beauty whom he remembered from the year before.  She was sixteen and, we soon learned, hadn’t spent the previous year pining for Jordie’s return.As we approached her house, the figure of the bigger, older boy seated next to her under the porch light was Jordie’s clue to retreat, but I stupidly kept walking.  Before I knew it, this young man was on the sidewalk in front of me, his chin six inches from my nose, puffing out his chest, and asking me heated questions in completely unintelligible Spanish.  Struggling to recall the words in my dictionary, I had managed to stutter only a few sentences when suddenly Jordie reappeared by my side.

Jordie didn’t like to speak Spanish around me.  In fact, until that moment I really wasn’t sure he could speak Spanish at all, but suddenly this foreign idiom gushed mellifluously from his mouth like a fountain.  I was astonished.  So too, apparently, was the angry young man, who began to take steps cautiously back and away from me as Jordie spoke. I had been saved.   Jordie expressed his apologies to the girl and her (obviously new) boyfriend, and we left.

On the walk home, I asked Jordie what he had said to the other boy.  “That you are demented and cannot help yourself,” Jordie replied.  I suppose, in a way, that was true.  My Spanish has not improved much in the years since.

Jose “Pepito” Figueroa (right) and his brother, pianist Narciso Figueroa.

When I wasn’t inciting violence on the streets of San Juan, that summer, I was immersed in a wonderful world of music.  Jordie’s father was Jose “Pepito” Figueroa, scion of the island’s most musical family and a world-renowned violinist.  The large, rambling house where we came to stay with Jose and his sisters Angelina and Carmelina–both concert pianists and teachers in the music school they founded–had six pianos.  I would wander through the house from one to another, banging out what surely was a nerve-wracking, three-fingered improvisation of Malaguena.  Jose would smile when I played it with more gusto than technique on the grand piano in the parlor, interrupting me occasionally to yell “Puerta! Puerta!” at the cat that would wander in to listen.

Years later, I would learn that Jose made his first international concert tour at age 12.  He went on to take the coveted first prize in violin from the Royal Conservatory in Madrid and the Pablo Sarasate prize.  As a young man he stole the hearts of Europe with his music, studying in Paris and performing in the royal court of Spain for the queen before returning home to receive from the people of Puerto Rico the gift of a Stradivarius violin.  Antonio Stradivari died in 1737, and less than 500 of his violins survive, today.  An admiring public had raised the money to buy one for Jose, who could never have afforded it on his own.  I smile now to realize that this was the same “fiddle” that Jose took out to play on visits to my house in Baltimore, when my grandmother would implore him to play “Turkey in the Straw.”  He never refused, and he played it with a smile.  Flawlessly.

Jose was like a god to me.  Struggling to comply with my piano teacher’s constant begging that I practice just 30 minutes a day, I asked Jose one day how much he had practiced when he was my age.  “Six hours a day,” he said.  I couldn’t have played dumb, much less played the piano, for six hours every day.  But you knew what it meant when you heard Jose play.  I may not have always applied the lessons on discipline and dignity and decorum that Jose imparted by his example, but I learned them.  There was something unattainable, even mystical in the sound he elicited from the instrument.  Yet I never knew a more humble man.  When he died, in 1998, it was said that not since Bach had there been a musical family as prolific as the Figueroas.  (Jose’s Stradivarius lives on.  To see and hear it in the hands of Jose’s nephew Guillermo Figueroa–for many years, now, an impressario in his own right–click here.)

Jascha Heifetz

In later years, I would tell my cousin Pepe, Jordie’s older brother, of my admiration for his father and his music.  It was an admiration far exceeded in Pepe’s own heart, but he shared with me a story of the violinist whom even Jose and his brothers revered.  That man was Jascha Heifetz.

Heifetz played with a level of technique and precision, as Pepe explained, that even accomplished violinists recognized as something not of this world.  Something that no amount of practice could achieve.  Something that one cannot take or make but rather must be given.  When they spoke Heifetz’ name, they did so with heads bowed in the same gesture of reverence accorded to the moment of incarnation in the liturgy of the Nicene Creed.  When he played, they believed that the sound they heard was rendered by the hand of God.

I suspect that Jascha Heifetz would still win the vote of many of the admiring fans who came to hear Itzhak Perlman play, that night in Raleigh, if not also the vote of Mr. Perlman himself.  But as for me, I’m not so sure.  Itzhak plays a mean fiddle, and no doubt Heifetz could really throw down, but I know the genuine article when I see it, and I saw and heard it that summer of 1972.

My vote goes to Pepito.