THE IMMORTALS: Nathan Milstein

Nathan Milstein was a violinist’s violinist. Purity was his watchword as he negotiated even the most notorious technical chicanery with a nonchalant sleight-of-hand. He avoided the use of shoulder pads or rests as they impeded the jewelled perfection of his sound, activated by long flowing bow-strokes sustained at comparatively low pressure. His playing arose out of a legato bedrock, studiously avoiding the percussive ‘kick’ of a traditional staccato. Employing the angled bow-hold and concave thumb of his teacher Leopold Auer (rarely encountered nowadays) and activating each stroke from the shoulder, his sweeping arm action created a seamless flow. His unusually supple left-hand fingers hovered perilously close to the strings and fell gently – he could not abide high-velocity, high trajectory fingering and its attendant ‘banging’ on the fingerboard. The resultant effect was as though his hands and arms were merely floating around the instrument as he played it.

Milstein’s stage persona was as elegant and undistracting as his playing mechanism. Some mistook his lack of flamboyance for interpretative cool, yet careful listening, and watching, reveals his profound micromanagement of phrasing and inflection, entirely free of rhetorical gesture. He tended to avoid the cloying espressivo of a slow vibrato, preferring to explore the medium-to-fast range and senza (‘without’) so as not to impair the shimmering accuracy of his intonation. He had a special sensitivity for the violin’s tonal spectrum – grounded by its open strings (G–D–A–E) – and used natural harmonics freely (achieved by touching the string lightly at specific points) as a means of anchoring the tuning of ordinary, stopped notes.

Milstein continually honed and refined his playing in an attempt to discover ever-more graceful solutions to the thornier challenges of the repertoire. He kept his playing fresh by adopting new fingerings as the occasion demanded, even in mid-performance as the inspiration came to him. Little wonder that the renowned New York Times critic and journalist Harold C Schoenberg once described Milstein as ‘The most nearly perfect violinist of his time.’

Of all the great violin concertos, the Mendelssohn E minor came closest to matching the jewelled perfection of Milstein’s quicksilver soundworld. Recorded with the Chicago Symphony and Walter Hendl in March 1962, when Milstein was at the height of his powers, one can savour at close hand his majestic playing action, capped by a glorious downward octave portamento in the final coda at 26:33. Keep watching as a stunning performance (recorded the following year) of the Preludio from Bach’s E major solo Partita follows:

Born in the Ukrainian city of Odessa in December 1903, Milstein insisted that ‘I started to play the violin not because I was drawn to it, but because my mother forced me to in order to keep me out of mischief!’ Aged seven he began formal lessons with Piotr Stolyarsky, and although he felt he learned very little from him at the time, Stolyarsky clearly knew a thing or two about the violin as his later pupils included Leonid Kogan and David Oistrakh. Four years later Milstein joined Leopold Auer’s legendary Moscow masterclasses, a hotbed of violinistic endeavour that had already produced Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman and Efrem Zimbalist (father of the American television actor). Even under the severe pressure of playing in front of 50 fellow students every lesson, Milstein stood out from the pack, astonishing Auer with his displays of ‘Black Sea technique’.

Returning to Odessa, Milstein quickly came to the attention of none other than rising piano superstar Vladimir Horowitz, with whom he established an instant rapport. ‘Horowitz invited me around for tea,’ Milstein later reflected, ‘and I ended up staying three years!’ The two chums became virtually inseparable and having earned the sobriquet ‘Children of the Revolution’, were given official permission to tour Western Europe. Milstein never returned to the homeland, heading instead (via a series of consultations with Eugène Ysaÿe) for the United States, where he made a sensational debut on 17 October 1929, playing the Glazunov Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski. The incandescent quality of Milstein’s playing at this time was captured four years later in a live Copenhagen recording of Paganini’s Caprice No 5, destined to become one of his signature pieces:

回到敖德萨后，米尔斯坦很快就得到了冉冉升起的钢琴巨星弗拉基米尔·霍洛维茨(Vladimir Horowitz)的注意，他与霍洛维茨建立了一种即时的融洽关系。“霍洛维茨邀请我去喝茶，”米尔斯坦后来想，“我最后在这里待了三年！”这两个密友几乎形影不离，赢得了“革命之子”的称号，获得了参观欧洲西部的官方许可。米尔斯坦再也没有回到祖国。他转而前往美国(通过与欧热妮·伊萨·伊萨的一系列磋商)，他于1929年10月17日在美国首次登台，与费城管弦乐队和利奥波德·斯托科夫斯基一起演奏格拉齐诺夫协奏曲。四年后，米尔斯坦在现场的一名警察中捕捉到了米尔斯坦当时演奏的白炽灯的质量。

It was around this time that Milstein formed a ‘million-dollar’ piano trio with Horowitz and the great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to rival even the all-star Heifetz-Rubinstein-Feuermann outfit. Piatigorsky discovered with some astonishment that Milstein rarely practised as such, but that he was ‘rarely without the fiddle in his hands’, as he experimented with new fingerings and bowings. ‘His quick movements, lively eyes and shiny black hair, and his medium-sized frame suggested youth that would stay with him forever,’ Piatigorsky also noted.

By now Milstein had acquired his first Stradivarius, the so-called ‘Dancla’ (1703), which can be savoured on two American recordings dating from 1942. The first features the slow movement of Bruch’s G minor Concerto, which finds Milstein at his most radiantly expressive, inspired no doubt by the heartfelt conducting of John Barbirolli with the New York Philharmonic:

1989，米尔斯坦在主场摔得很厉害，右臂受伤，他再也不能上场了。在休养期间，米尔斯坦的著名同事和忠实的崇拜者品查斯·祖克曼(Pinchas Zukerman)在家中拜访了他，问米尔斯坦他演奏的秘诀是什么--“没有破坏情绪”的回答让人心烦意乱。米尔斯坦平静地接受了这种情况，转而把注意力转向一系列小提琴抄写，这些作品概括了他整个演奏生涯中的精致品味和风格。“他的小提琴属于他的身体不亚于他的胳膊和腿，”皮亚蒂戈斯基曾经记忆深刻地观察到。“内森只能是个了不起的小提琴家。”

2015年9月28日朱利安·海洛克

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