The Itzhak Perlman Music Program, at the Met
My favorite New York luxury is really an Upper East Side luxury, although there are luxuries like it all over town. If you can walk to wherever you’re going for the evening, have your night out, and then walk home again, weather permitting, you’re enjoying a pleasure that is denied to most Americans – certainly to nearly all affluent ones. I consider myself lucky to live only a few subway stops from Midtown Manhattan, but not to have to board a bus or a train or slip into a taxi at all is my idea of dandy. That’s why I peruse the Metropolitan Museum’s music calendars long before I look at Carnegie Hall’s.*
The season got under way a weekend or so ago with the first of three recitals by the Itzhak Perlman Music Program, featuring the eminent violinist himself but not to the complete eclipse of brilliant young talent. You can whine about the decline of classical music all you like, but to my ear musicians have never sounded as good as they do today. I came away with the name of violist Wei-Yang Andy Lin hardwired onto my antennae: I certainly hope that he happens to like New York.
¶ The Itzhak Perlman Music Program, at the Met.Â
* For ease of access, Lincoln Center might as well be in New Jersey.