Thus it is that EMI has just released three DVDs of Itzhak Perlman dating from the early 1990s. Perlman in Russia contains two disks. One is a documentary on his 1990 trip, in which we see him talking to Jewish figures (and hearing the opinion that four out of five of them wanted to emigrate to Israel), and visiting a center where people with disabilities similar to his own receive treatment that can't compare with what he's able to get in the US. We also learn that the violin he plays used to belong to Yehudi Menuhin. The second DVD shows a Moscow recital with pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim.
Perlman's trip to Russia was particularly significant because he went there with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and a visit a decade earlier had been canceled at the last moment by the then Soviet authorities. Russian anti-Semitism, including earlier government anti-Semitism, in other words, formed the background to the entire visit, and made the rapturous reception the musicians received all the more gratifying.
A separate item, Beethoven, Brahms: Violin Concertos, is of a 1992 concert in Berlin with the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim. These are much-recorded works, but high sound quality on this DVD is particularly remarkable. Both of these Perlman products contain electronic booklets accessable via a DVD-ROM drive and Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.
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