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NATHAN MILSTEIN, 57. another native of Odessa, was a student of famed Hungarian-born Leopold Auer at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where, recalls Milstein, the young Heifetz was already established as "the Prince of Wales of fiddlers." A post-conservatory concert success in Russia, Milstein left for Paris in 1925, gave concerts with an old Russian friend, Pianist Vladimir Horowitz. It was not until after World War II, when he married and settled down in Manhattan, that he began to build a reputation as something more than an extraordinarily gifted virtuoso. Milstein is still a master of the bravura composers—Max Bruch, Sarasate—but he has found new and interesting things to say about Brahms, Beethoven, Bach. The keynotes of great Milstein performances are their flash and fire. Milstein is willing to take chances—on trip-hammer tempos, flashing colors, amazing fluctuations in volume. His taste as a listener runs to chamber music: symphony concerts, says Violinist Milstein, are "cold excitement, because the man who makes the music—the conductor-doesn't make the sound."
JASCHA HEIFETZ, 60, is considered by many of his associates to be the greatest violinist living. Says Oistrakh: "There are many great violinists, but Heifetz, he is in a class by himself." Ever since Heifetz made his astounding debut in Carnegie Hall when he was 16,* two generations of record listeners have luxuriated in the luscious Heifetz tone, making its creator one of the biggest sellers—1,700,000 albums—in classical-record history. The Heifetz left hand, in its agility and strength, is unsurpassed, and it enables him to play with a fleetness and accuracy that so astounded Arturo Toscanini when he first heard Heifetz that he reported, "I nearly lost my mind." Heifetz can reduce an audience to tears, and he does so with a surprising economy of effects. He knows the kind of communication be tween stage and audience that Isaac Stern once described: "Standing on the stage alone with only a piece of wood with some strings and horsehair between you and the audience, you have to have the belief that 'I have something to give you.' " The matchless possessor of that belief has been enjoying a semi-vacation from his public for the past six years, spending most of his time in his Beverly Hills home and engaging in occasional chamber-music sessions with his friends Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and Violinist William Primrose. Next week he will begin teaching master classes (no more than four students) at the University of Southern California. He will also do some recording this year and give a few concerts. But he will never again be a traveling soloist. Says Heifetz: "It requires the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk."
* "It is not like the piano, whose tone is kept in tune by the tuner," Jascha Heifetz once complained. "Playing the violin is all guesswork; you cannot even scratch a mark on the wood so you can tell where to put your fingers to repeat the right note."
* A performance that called forth a classic exchange. Violinist Mischa Elman: "It's hot in here." Pianist Leopold Godowsky: "Not for pianists."