Tchaikovsky’s Third or Thayer’s Second?

The San Diego Symphony titled last Friday evening’s Jacobs Masterworks program “Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony”, but when the audience rose to its feet in wonderfully noisy acclamation just before intermission, it was pretty clear that they had spontaneously re-named the evening “Jeff Thayer’s Second”, to honor the San Diego Symphony’s concertmaster for his impressive performance of one of the monuments of the violin repertoire, Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2…

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Perlman Dazzles as Symphony Soloist

Pro basketball hall of famer Bill Walton may have been the tallest man at San Diego’s Jacobs Music Center – Copley Symphony Hall on Saturday night, but he was not the biggest. Instead, it was legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman who was the evening’s star attraction, dazzling concertgoers young and old, short and (very) tall with the first of two masterful weekend performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61.

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