To the extent that picking up a baton and leading an orchestra entitles someone to be called a conductor, then apparently anyone can be a conductor these days. Tenor
Plácido Domingo is a conductor. Pianist
Daniel Barenboim is a conductor. And now violinist
Itzhak Perlman is a conductor. And if that sounds believable, there's a bridge for sale in Brooklyn, too.
Itzhak Perlman has been acknowledged to be one of the world's greatest violinists for decades, but that doesn't mean he can conduct. Listen to his disc of Mozart with the
Berlin Philharmonic: listen to the gawky and graceless performance of the Violin Concerto in G major, to the gasping and groaning performance of the Adagio and Fugue, and to the ungainly and nearly incoherent "Jupiter Symphony."
Perlman seems to have no grasp of baton technique: entrances are frayed and balances are random. Nor does he seem to be able to establish a tempo and stick with it: the Andante cantabile of the "Jupiter" staggers and lurches from tempo to tempo like a drunken sailor. That the
Berlin Philharmonic -- one of the greatest orchestras in the world -- could play so execrably is testimony to
Perlman's talents as a conductor. This is as terrible a Mozart disc as has ever been released.