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Cover
Story
by Edith Eisler One person’s misfortune can be another’s lucky break. Everybody knows stories of understudies who became famous overnight when they stepped in for an indisposed star. This happens not only in the theater but on the concert stage as well. When violinist Itzhak Perlman could not travel to London in 1989 because of an ear infection, Gil Shaham, age 18, got his big chance taking over the Bruch and Sibelius Concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra. Since then, his career has flourished. He travels all over the world, giving recitals and performing with the most prestigious orchestras and conductors. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, he has recorded concertos, sonatas, and solo pieces and won several Grammy nominations. I first heard him several years ago with the New York Philharmonic and was immediately captivated by his innate musicality and beautiful, expressive tone, which can glow like bronze and shimmer like gold. He revels in his dazzling, effortless, but completely unobtrusive virtuosity and radiates an infectious enjoyment of the music. Yet his early fame has not gone to his head. We spoke this past summer and it became clear that, just as he is natural and unassuming on stage, he is extraordinarily modest in conversation, attributing not only his first big break but also his subsequent success entirely to luck, as if superior talent and hard work had nothing to do with it. Tell me something about your background. My parents are both Israeli—in fact, my mother’s family claims to have been in Jerusalem for nine generations! I was born in 1971, in Urbana, Illinois, where my parents were doing post-doctoral studies at the university. We all went back to Israel before I was two years old, so I have dual citizenship and can go to, say, Cuba on my Israeli passport and Syria on my American passport. That covers a wide range of travel. I grew up in Jerusalem and came to this country when I was 11, and I’ve lived in New York ever since. Are your parents still in Israel? My mother lives in New York; my father passed away four years ago, when he was still quite young. I have an older brother in San Francisco, and my sister lives in New York. She is a pianist. I’ve heard you play with her. People were always asking us to play together. You know, a brother-and-sister act—it’s a gimmick, it means money, and managers and presenters like that. But for years we consciously avoided it; our parents always kept our lives separate, which I now think was very good. Finally, about two or three years ago, we decided to try teaming up in a limited way. We did a radio show in New York, and somebody from Deutsche Grammophon heard it and suggested making a record, so we looked at each other and said, "OK, why not?" That’s a Dvorák program, isn’t it? Yes, we fell in love with his music when we were teenagers. The Sonatina is very popular; the Sonata was popular during his lifetime and then fell out of fashion—it’s much more elusive and harder to bring off. The Romantic Pieces, too, are very difficult, but not in a way that impresses the audience. However, I’m very fond of all these pieces. We performed the repertoire a few times before we recorded it, and the next year we did a three-week tour together, traveling across the United States from Alaska to Florida, and it really was fun. Since then, we haven’t done anything so concentrated, but we still play with each other occasionally. This summer [1999], we’ll play the Mendelssohn Concerto for Violin and Piano, which is terribly difficult, in Aspen. Isn’t that where you met Dorothy DeLay? I know you studied with her at Juilliard. Yes, I played at the Aspen Festival when I was ten and talked with Miss DeLay about coming to Juilliard the following year, because my mother was doing more post-doctoral work and my father had a sabbatical, so we were planning to come to America for a while then. I studied with Miss DeLay for about nine years, and during that time I also worked with Jens Ellermann and Hyo Kang, all wonderful teachers, and I had chamber music with Felix Galimir. So I was very lucky. But I studied in Jerusalem before that, first with Samuel Bernstein, who just passed away, then with Chaim Taub, who was concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic for many years and is now retired. Miss DeLay is so famous that the others tend to be overlooked, and I always feel a little bad about that; I was very lucky with all my teachers. Didn’t you also play for Isaac Stern? Yes, several times, and it was great. I remember playing the Mendelssohn and the first Prokofiev Concerto, and having some wonderful coaching on the Brahms D-Minor Sonata with Rohan de Silva, a very fine pianist with whom I’ve played a lot; we came away really inspired. Mr. Stern told us we needed to focus more on the pulse, the sound. In the first phrase of the Brahms, for example, he said, "This D has to hover and glow above the A." Did he say anything about those strange swells on the eighth notes that are almost impossible to execute? I actually asked him about that [sings them], and he said we were focusing too much on the swells. Yes, most people simply ignore them. [Sings again.] I guess those eighths are neighboring tones to the preceding note, as well as passing tones to the next one—maybe the swells are there to emphasize that double function. I learned a lot from Mr. Stern, because he had so much experience playing and coaching those pieces, and with music generally, that he knew exactly how to bring out everything we had in us. To be quite honest, I was so terrified that I was literally shaking, but he was very kind and good at talking to young kids; I was a teenager at the time. You were also still a teenager when you burst upon the concert scene, and you did it without either starting as a prodigy or winning a lot of competitions. Yes, I was very lucky: I had a normal childhood, going to school while I was studying music, and I didn’t have to take the competition route. I really think that’s the worst kind of experience a musician can have. When you play a concert, it’s for pleasure, the audience is there for love of the music and to enjoy itself. But at competitions or auditions, you feel everybody’s out to get you. Now my wife, Adele Anthony, who is also a violinist, has taken competitions and won first prize in the Nielsen and second in the Thibaut Competition, but even though she was so successful, just going through the experience with her showed me that I wouldn’t have the emotional strength to do it myself. So instead of winning a prize, you got your start stepping in for Perlman. I was very lucky to be ready for it; somehow the planets must have been aligned properly. I had played with the London Symphony the year before, in the Prokofiev D-Major Concerto. But when Perlman canceled, I’m sure they tried 500 other violinists before me; it was my luck that none of them could make it. So I got a call from my agency, ICM Artists—"Do you think you can hop on the Concorde and fly to London?" It was really like a dream, something out of the movies: suddenly I had this chance and I was lucky enough to be able to say "yes" with confidence, because I knew the repertoire, the Bruch and Sibelius Concertos. Here I was, a high-school kid, with the option of going to English class or to London. It was very exciting, but the time was very tight, so we had only one rehearsal the afternoon of the concert. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted and he was so supportive. Everybody was behind me, cheering for me, even people I’d never met before. It was really a fun thing to do, but right before I went on stage it suddenly hit me that people were expecting Itzhak Perlman, not me. Didn’t they know? Well, I thought they might have missed the announcement. That’s when I got a bit nervous, but it was already too late. That concert was really my big break: it got me a lot of attention from the press and lots of invitations to play. Even today, people still tell me they heard about me through that story. How many concerts a year do you play now? I’m not sure. This year, I think I’ve done about 180. That’s one every other day! I feel very lucky to have all these opportunities to play, and when I think about it, is there any other job where people work only 180 days a year? What’s more, if I play a recital, it’s maybe two hours’ work; if I play a concerto, it’s only 40 minutes. But you have to do a lot of work before with practicing and rehearsing, not to mention the constant traveling. What’s it like to be on the road so much? Well, when you pack your suitcase, leave your house, and get ready to go and play your concert, you feel as if you press the "pause" button on your life. And when you come back, you press the "play" button, pay the phone bill, do the laundry, before you have to pack again a couple of days later and put your life back on "pause." I’ve been doing this for almost ten years now, so I think in future I’ll try to press "pause" a little less and "play" a little more. That means turning down engagements. Can one do that? I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. It’s so nice to be asked to play; for a musician, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it? If people want me to play, how can I say no? Do you usually stay in one place for several days? When I started out, I tried to do that. It was very enticing to spend a few extra days in Paris and enjoy the sights. Now I try to minimize my time away from home and come back as fast as I can. My wife also travels quite a bit—she does solo work and plays with some chamber groups, including the Sejong Soloists, a young 13-piece string group. One night recently, they left for Japan when I had just come back from Chicago the day before; we had two days together. It’s crazy, so we’ve learned to get on the next plane home. Do you have time to practice on tour? At this point in my life, I know exactly how to make use of every minute on tour, and actually accomplish more than at home, where I can be rather at loose ends. There’s a structure about catching a plane and going to a hotel. I can practice late at night with a practice mute even while I’m jet-lagged. Ah yes, the jet lag—how do you handle that? For me, it’s the worst part. They say it takes one day to recover from every hour of time difference, so now I really try to plan for that. When I go to Europe, I try—I don’t always succeed—to have six days off to adjust, because I know I won’t be able to fall asleep and will be wide awake reading or practicing at 1:00 in the morning, and it’s the same when I come back. It’s funny, all the things you gradually figure out. I know I can do orchestra rehearsals in the afternoon, but not in the morning, because 10:00 a.m. in Europe is 4:00 a.m. here, and I haven’t slept all night and am completely knocked out. All my friends say the same. You must sleep during the day, or you just crash. In the beginning, before I knew all this, I found myself asleep on the couch in my dressing room two minutes before I had to go on stage . . . that’s no way to be fresh for a concert. I’ve also learned to sleep on the plane, and when I’m awake, I read; it’s about the only chance I get. After taking a long trip, do you play several concerts in the same place? Only when I play a concerto, because some orchestras have a subscription week. That means a rehearsal, say, on Wednesday, a dress rehearsal Thursday, concerts Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and sometimes also the following Tuesday. That’s the longest time I ever get to spend in one place. For a recital, I usually come in that day, play that evening, and move on the next day. Do you bring your own pianist? Yes. This season I am doing most of my concerts with Akira Eguchi, a wonderful pianist. We travel together, which is much nicer than traveling alone, and we can rehearse beforehand—in fact, he lives across the street from us. I’ve also done some concerts with Jonathan Feldman and am going to make a recording with him, and sometimes I play with my sister. Can you choose the orchestras and conductors with whom you play? Yes, in the sense that I could say no, but I am very lucky, because most of the time I work with people I know and get along with. The first time, it’s like meeting people in any other situation: you never know how it’s going to work. But I haven’t had any really bad experiences. In two rehearsals, is there even time to discuss the music? That’s a great question. I wish—and I understand it’s impossible, the way the music world is set up—but I wish we could rehearse more, and not on the same day as the concert, because it drains out all the energy. And for the wind players it’s even worse to play a two-hour concert after two or three hours of rehearsal. Do you get a chance to confer with the conductors ahead of time? Yes, they usually like to have a rehearsal with piano. Suppose there is a real disagreement, about tempos or something like that. Then you have to compromise. But you know, I’ve never met a musician from whom I couldn’t learn. Even if I finally have to play at a different tempo than I would have liked, I always feel it’s been a good experience and that I gained something I can grow with. Do you choose what concerto you’ll play? I make suggestions, they make suggestions, and by the third or fourth fax we agree. Sometimes a conductor, or an orchestra, or maybe the marketing department, will invite me only on condition that I perform a certain piece; if it’s one I like, and if I can prepare it properly, I’ll agree to play it. But one of the good things about being a sort of freelance musician is that I can always refuse to play this concerto, or go to that place, on a given date. So I end up performing only music I enjoy playing with people I love working with. It’s too good to be true—I’ve been very, very lucky with my life so far. That’s wonderful, but you’ve also worked very hard, or you wouldn’t play the way you do—though I must say you make it seem as easy and enjoyable as eating an ice-cream sundae. How do you choose your repertoire? I guess I’m very boring: I like the standard literature. Any favorites? That’s very difficult to answer. If I were backed into a corner, I might pick, among the concertos, Mendelssohn, which Joachim called the heart’s jewel, and Brahms, Beethoven. You also play a lot of contemporary music; how do you choose that? I don’t have any rules. I just go by what I love, what excites me and inspires me. Have you found that you develop a special feeling for certain styles at different times in your life? Yes, I do tend to go through phases. For two years I went through a big Bartók phase, studying all his works and trying to learn as much as I could about him and his music. The Second Concerto I’ve known and played since I was 13 years old, so that’s been a long, loving relationship. When you played it recently with the Philharmonic, that love came through very strongly, as it does on your recording: the way you handle those Hungarian rhythms and get inside those changing moods, and make it all seem so easy and sound so beautiful. Do you play the first concerto? I’ve never performed it, though I’ve studied it and think it’s great. Maybe that should be my next project. When you record concertos, do you choose the pieces and the orchestra? In the beginning, the conversations with the people at Deutsche Grammophon went something like this: "These are our ideas, we have a catalog to fill, this is what we’d like you to do." And unless it was something I really objected to, I would jump at the opportunity. Now I’ve been with them for ten years and I really feel I can make suggestions and speak about projects. For example, for years I wanted to record the Korngold Concerto—I think it’s beautiful, masterfully written, and I love it. Well, they kept saying "no, it’s a big investment, the marketing department worries how many copies we can sell," and so on. Then maybe five or six years later, we finally recorded it, under André Previn, together with the Barber Concerto, and luckily for me, it sold well and recouped the cost. So over the years, they’ve grown to trust me a little more and we now have a very nice working relationship. Do you perform a piece before you record it? Well, again, in the beginning, I made some recordings cold, sometimes even without rehearsal, which—looking back on it now—I realize was very frustrating, because one can get much better results with enough rehearsal and some public concerts. So now I try as much as possible to insist on performing before I record. It makes all the difference in the world. But when you record with a pianist, can you rehearse as much as necessary? That’s right. I like making music with friends; as in any other field, working with people you know and get along with is much nicer and more productive than being thrown together in a recording studio. For example, a few years ago I recorded the Sonata by André Previn, which was then brand-new. I saw the music and fell in love with it instantly—I thought it was so beautiful! André was also interested in recording it, so we did it together. Until then, I had known him only in his conductor’s hat; here, he wore the pianist’s and the composer’s. What I love about the Sonata is that it’s very much like him: his personality comes out in the music in all its sensitivity and complexity. That project was really special for me, and playing and recording with the composer was a unique experience. Have you recorded any other contemporary music? Yes, Arvo Pärt’s Fratres and Tabula rasa with Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony; my wife plays the other violin part in Tabula. Next I’m going to record Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with Paul Meyer on clarinet, Jian Wang on cello, and Myun-Wha Chung at the piano. We’ll get together in Paris for a few weeks to rehearse, and that will be very nice. Are you adding anything to your core repertoire? This is the first year I’ve ever played Bach’s violin and keyboard sonatas; they are so beautiful! I’ve done the fourth and the third with my sister and Akira [Eguchi]. How do you build a recital program? Again, I guess I’m very boring [laughs]. Sometimes you have programs with three big sonatas, which is great, but I do think it creates a sort of competition between them: which is the focus? So I really like to have one big piece, or maybe two sonatas in the first half, and shorter pieces in the second, both for my own sake and the audience’s. I play pretty much the standard sonatas, and am always looking for short pieces. Do you know the pieces by Robert Fuchs? They are very beautiful. And I recently heard that there are six original violin sonatas by Scarlatti. Do you get to play any chamber music? Occasionally, but I really would like to do a lot more, because especially for a violinist, that’s the greatest literature. Every few months I get together with a different group. I’ve played with members of the Boston Symphony in Tanglewood, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Minnesota Orchestra, and that’s really nice. With all the summer festivals you visit, do you ever get a vacation? Yes! After we got married [November 1998], we took a week off and went to Florida, and it was fantastic. We just sat on that beautiful beach and relaxed, and didn’t do any of the things we had planned. It was very difficult to leave. What are your plans for the future, or at least for next season? I’m going to record the Brahms Concerto, which I love, with the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado next summer, so I have a year to learn it. This past summer I played at Tanglewood, Aspen, Salzburg, Lucerne, and several other places. And now I’m touring America: I’ll play concertos in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Springfield, and St. Paul. Then Europe in the winter: Paris, Cologne, Denmark, Rome, Barcelona. How about New York? That’s what I really want to know. I’m playing at Carnegie Hall twice: the Bartók Rhapsodies with the Philadelphia Orchestra in October [1999], and a recital in the spring. I’ll be there!
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Gil
Shaham