Music: Perlman and Zukerman (Video)

When I was kid, my family often visited Mendocino on the California coast, a Victorian village that, at the time, hosted a lot of aging hippies and their bohemian shops. One of those hippies had a record store. We would come out of the fog, salt air, and wind into a narrow room that smelled of pipe smoke. The old guy sat at the counter, Gandalf without the hat, presiding over the best collection of classical vinyl my young eyes had ever seen. I could get violin records in his store that I couldn’t find anywhere else. It must have been unusual to see a 10-year-old boy buying Itzhak Perlman albums, but he acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world, approving of my purchases without any hint of condescension. One of my treasures from that store was Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman playing violin and viola duets. The Handel-Halvorsen piece was on that album, recorded probably twenty years before this video and played better. But in this clip you get a sense of the two masters clowning around backstage, and then getting down to business.