Violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, seen and heard nationally by millions this year when he played at President Obama’s inauguration, has a favored formula for recital programming.

“It’s really very simple,” he said in a late-August phone call. “I like to play what I am comfortable with, what I am able to give the audience, what I would like to listen to when I go to a concert. I can wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s do this, let’s do that.’ Doing a recital should be fun, and it should be a good recital for listener and player.”

At 69, the Israeli-American violinist, conductor and teacher and Lifetime Grammy Achievement Award-winner has more than earned the right to do it his way.

And that way should find favor with fans when he appears with pianist Rohan de Silva at Hill Auditorium on Sunday afternoon to open the University Musical Society’s 131st season. Like the recital he played here with de Silva in 2000, the music is scripted and unscripted, a mix of works already chosen and announced — sonatas by Leclair and Beethoven and Stravinsky’s “Suite Italienne” — followed by works chosen on the spot and announced from the stage.

“I don’t like to say, ‘I’ve got to play this because I have to,’” he said. “I like to say it’s because I want to.” It would be fair to call the D Major Sonata for violin and piano, Op. 9, No. 3, by French baroque composer Jean-Marie Leclair “a signature opener.”

“It was one of the sonatas that I performed on my very, very first recording,” Perlman said of the work, which begins the concert. “It’s very close to me.”

Of course, he points out, that recording only saw the light of day this decade, since the RCA powers-that-were decided they wanted his first album to be violin and orchestra rather than baroque and romantic pieces for violin and piano.

“It stayed in the can quite a few years,” said Perlman, “and then they reissued it a few years ago.” The album’s title, on BMG, is “Itzhak Perlman Rediscovered.”

“It was very funny,” he added, “because they had a set of recordings issued from other artists that they included this one with, and most of the recordings were of people who were no longer alive. So I got this phone call saying, ‘What would you like us to do with the royalties? They usually go to the estate — what should we do?”

The Beethoven sonata on the bill, Op. 30, No. 2 (“Eroica”), is also an old friend, Perlman said. “It’s one of the great sonatas, exemplifying Beethoven’s drama, and it’s something I love to play,” he said. Humor, understated, to be sure — “very dry,” Perlman says — is the trait that draws him to Stravinsky’s charming, baroque-influenced “Suite Italienne,” a reworking for violin and piano of the composer’s ballet “Pulcinella.” While his recording of the work is no longer available, it’s possible to have a listen on You Tube, in a performance at the White House.

While Perlman is best known, of course, as the man with the fiddle in hand, he has frequently, in recent years, wielded a baton as conductor. This season, for example, he conducts concerts with the San Francisco, New Jersey, Seattle, Baltimore and Dallas symphonies and the Israel Philharmonic. He also begins his second season as artistic director of the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra.

Conducting — and teaching, whether at the Juilliard School or in his Perlman Music Program — have definitely influenced his music making, he says.

“All of them help each other,” he says. “You have to listen from different perspectives and listen differently. There’s some of the teacher present when you conduct: What do you say to make a difference when you conduct people who play well and who have played a Beethoven symphony for the 500th time? And then, when you play yourself, you say, ‘I’ll do it this way because I’m the boss here. Then I’ve got my instant teacher with me while I’m playing.

Who: Itzhak Perlman, violin, and Rohan de Silva, piano. What: A recital of music by Leclair, Beethoven, Stravinsky and others. When: Sunday, Sept. 13, 4 p.m. Where: Hill Auditorium, 825 N. University Ave. How Much: $10-$80, University Musical Society Michigan League Ticket Office, 734-764-2538, and online at UMS web site.

Top photo: Itzhak Perlman by Akira Kinoshita Second photo: Rohan de Silva by John Beebe