I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

The challenge of playing the Mendelssohn Valley concerto for the first time is because

you don't know whether you'll survive it. But once you survive it, the challenge is what do you

do the second time? What do you do the third time? What do you do the tenth time?

You have to have something inside of you that says, oh this is something special.

That's it, Sack Pearlman, one of the world's greatest violinists. We had a really interesting

conversation about one of the world's oldest forms of communication, music. We recorded our talk

in his apartment in Manhattan. As soon as we began, I couldn't resist asking him about his

unusual style of relating to his audience, unusual for classical musicians anyway. You know what I

love is the way you talk to the audience. Do you talk to all audiences that recitals are just a few?

Let me tell you what I do. I usually don't talk to the audience to begin with at all.

The first half of the concert I usually just play, but no talking.

The second half of the concert have a talk a little bit. Yeah, because it's a concert.

Yeah, well I don't do stand-up. I usually do sit-down. But no, I always thought it would be nice

to have a little communication with the audience. They feel like there is a barrier that you cannot

see between the stage and the audience. The minute you start to talk, the barrier goes away.

So this is a new thing now. We're talking to many other people.

Yeah, the other people. We're in a Fleming. I was talking to the other day. She talks to the

audience at recitals. Are more people doing it, do you think? Well, I know that we are.

When my wife's program, the program, the music program, we encourage the kids to always announce

what they're going to play or tell some anecdotes about the piece and so on. So to make them more

comfortable on the stage. But it seems to me the thing about a musical performance is that it's not

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