Nathan of Odessa

With two exceptions,* all of today's first-rank violinists are Jews. A good percentage of them are also Russians. And practically all of the Russians (Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, etc.) are onetime pupils of crotchety, bearded, Hungarian-Jewish Leopold Auer,/- who went to St. Petersburg in 1868 to teach at Czar Alexander II's Imperial Conservatory of Music.

Before Auer went there, great Russian violinists were scarcer than caviar on a peasant's table. By the time he left Europe, in 1919, to spend his declining years at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, he had made the term "Russian violinist" as much a commonplace as "Italian tenor." Critics sometimes complained that Auer's Russians sacrificed elegance and emotion for pyrotechnics and schmalz. But it had to be admitted that nobody could touch Auer for teaching luscious tone quality, machinelike fleetness and accuracy of fingerwork.

Jascha Heifetz has long been widely regarded as the greatest Auer pupil. He has long been closely trailed, in the opinion of most critics, by dark, solemn, boyish-looking Nathan Milstein, 38. So self-effacing and publicity-shy is Nathan Milstein that, despite 13 years of U.S. touring, few people except violin enthusiasts know who he is. Last week, after a crowded recital in Carnegie Hall, critics as usual gave him the highest salutes.

Short, impassive Milstein fully seizes such melodious, bravura opportunities as the Tchaikovsky and Max Bruch concertos (both of which he has recorded for Columbia). But he is also among the most sensitive living interpreters of Beethoven's and Bach's violin music. To aging Violinist Fritz Kreisler (see cut) he is the greatest of today's younger generation of violinists. Unlike most Russian fiddlers, he had a wealthy father (a wool importer). Milstein was born in Odessa, was sent to the Imperial Conservatory at the age of eleven. The revolution stopped his violin lessons, but he went on a Russian tour with his lifelong friend, Pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

Milstein's talk is mostly about war or politics. He reads biography and history, plays a deadly game of gin rummy. Unmarried, he spends most of his time with a coterie of very close friends: Pianist Horowitz, Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, Choregrapher George Balanchine and his dancing wife Vera Zorina, Arturo Toscanini and Elsa Maxwell. He dislikes popular music and makes no bones about it.

Milstein has only one eccentricity: a method of remembering telephone numbers. He thinks of the digits from one to nine as positions on the G string of his Stradivarius, thus translates each combination of numbers into a melody. Then he has only to remember the exchange--and the melodv.

* U.S.-born Albert Spalding; German-born Adolf Busch.

/- Grandfather by adoption of Hollywood Cinecomedian Mischa Auer.

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