In 1948 a Tel Aviv conservatory rejected a three-year-old because he was physically too small to hold a violin. His mother bought him a toy one instead, and he taught himself melodies by ear. That child was Itzhak Perlman. This episode traces his journey from the radio broadcast of Jascha Heifetz that sparked his obsession, through the polio he contracted at four that left him playing seated with braces and crutches, to his arrival in New York at 13 to study with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard and a nerve-defying appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

We follow his Carnegie Hall debut in 1963, the Leventritt competition win in 1964, and the tours that introduced his warm golden tone to the world’s great orchestras, then watch him refuse the pedestal by recording jazz with Oscar Peterson, playing bluegrass and klezmer, singing a jailer in Tosca, and delivering the devastating solos of Schindler’s List. The conversation also covers the pre-recorded track behind his freezing 2009 inauguration performance with Yo-Yo Ma, his synesthesia, his marriage to fellow violinist Toby, the Perlman Music Program she founded in 1994, and honors including 16 Grammys, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Genesis Prize.

• How playing seated forced Perlman to invent a new physical vocabulary for generating power from the upper body
• Why surviving illness and relocation made a television camera feel like no threat at all
• What Galamian’s biomechanical drilling and DeLay’s psychological coaching each gave him
• Why a 1714 Stradivarius cannot survive January air in Washington and how the inauguration audio was handled
• How choral singing and shared practice at the Perlman Music Program fight the loneliness of the solo musician