A Master

At first. Americans might have tended to discount the report as just another fantastic boast about Russia. Then the sto ries began to sound more reliable, and musicians looked East with wild surmise.

Eventually, as recordings crossed the Atlantic, a question was being asked seriously: Is Russia's David Oistrakh the world's finest fiddler?

His competition is almost entirely made up of his countrymen, for most of today's great violinists are Russian (and, by an odd cultural phenomenon, Russian Jews). Their names: Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, Isaac Stern and (of Russian parents) Yehudi Menuhin. This week, for the first time, U.S. audiences had a chance to compare Oistrakh in person with the other violin masters. For, during Geneva's temporary thaw in the cold war, Moscow had decided to allow its most famous musical performer to come to the U.S.

Speck of Humanity. The overflow crowd in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall burst into applause when Violinist Oistrakh stepped from the wings. Then he and his longtime accompanist, Vladimir Yampolsky, began Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 12, No. 1. The whole first movement went by, muddled by Carnegie's overrated acoustics -or because of a debutant's jitters-before Oistrakh began to project the full voltage of his enormous musicianship.

He looked something like a pudgy businessman, his feet planted wide apart, his shoulders raised into a pugnacious attitude, his jowls quivering earnestly with every accent. But his style was impeccable. Every bow movement, from delicate nudges at the tip to slashing down-bow accents, produced a flawless tone, fine-drawn and luminous, made mellow but not ripe by judicious use of vibrato. In a concert full of lovely little touches-his method of approaching such an essentially meaningless figure as a trill was a joy to the sense of propriety-Oistrakh even managed to breathe warmth and dignity into the withered carcasses of Tartini's "Devil's Trill" Sonata and Ysaye's distraught Sonata-Ballade No. 3.

The finest music on the program was Prokofiev's Sonata No. 1, which is dedicated to Oistrakh. It opened with dark, slightly nasal low tones, sang its way up to the bright blossom of a double-stop and continued to sing to the last gay note. Highlights: a section of muted runs up and down the fingerboard that felt like being brushed with feathers, and a section that had the mysterious beauty of a girl singing to herself by a forest pool. When it was over, the crowd was too moved to cheer until the violinist came back for his curtain call.

No doubt about it: no violinist anywhere is David Oistrakh's master.

As soon as he left the stage. Virtuoso Oistrakh lost some of the firmness of figure and face, the no-nonsense attitude, the air of concentration. Instead, he became a modest speck of humanity -a medium-size man (5'6") who is losing his front hair and does not always find time to keep it trimmed in back; who has eagerly read rave reviews about himself for years, but blushes when he hears anybody speak flatteringly of his achievements; who has traveled across Europe for 20 years, but speaks only Russian and Yiddish-flavored German. David Oistrakh seems like just what he is: an energetic, 47-year-old Russian Jew who has found music a life that -in Soviet Russia and out -is worth living.

A Great School. Oistrakh was born the son of a poor bookkeeper in Odessa. He half humorously traces his name to the Yiddish exclamation oi and the Russian word strakh, which means fear. (His more serious derivation: the German Oes-terreich-Austria-where his ancestors presumably lived.) His father was often without work, and his mother had to piece out the family income by singing in the Odessa opera chorus, but he remembers no strakh. Says he: "Hunger isn't so serious for a young person."

Few careers were open to Jews in Czarist Russia, but music was one of the few.

The elder Oistrakh himself was an enthusiastic amateur fiddler, and he filled his son with ambition for a virtuoso's career. First he got a 1/8size instrument for the five-year-old, then 1/4 and 1/2, until finally David graduated to a full-size fiddle. The revolution brought no change in the fortunes of the nine-year-old boy. As soon as he had his diploma from Odessa Conservatory. Oistrakh started touring Russia from Leningrad to Siberia -and supporting his whole family with his earnings. "I played in big cities and little cities," he recalls, "with good conductors and bad, but it was all a great school for me."

In 1935 he met one of his few setbacks. In Warsaw's fabled Wieniawski violin concours, he lost first place to a 15-year-old girl named Ginette Neveu (whose astonishing genius was snuffed out when she died in an airplane crash in 1949). "I was happy," says Oistrakh generously. "It was the first time I was abroad, and there were such great violinists there."

The Stalin Prize. Oistrakh's successful career inevitably brings up the question: What is the condition of art in a police state? Oistrakh blandly claims that musicians in Russia are free, without mentioning the groveling self-accusations forced from composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich for deviations from the esthetic party line. Proudly he says: "The government gets engagements for the young conservatory graduate -if he's talented, concerts; if less talented, in orchestras." He also asserts that Russia is not cut off from the changing styles of Western music. He is familiar with such unregenerate modernists as Alban Berg, but does not perform them: "What is very difficult for me. I don't play."

On the concert stage Oistrakh appears with the small gold emblem of the Stalin Prize in the lapel of his well-tailored tails, and in 1951 he wrote an anti-American article in the Soviet review New Times about the "climate of bellicose hysteria that the American propaganda seeks to impose." (Today he half apologizes for the article by pointing to all the nasty things the Western press has said about Russia.) Oistrakh seems to enjoy a large degree of independence from the usual restrictions on junketing Russians. Getting interested in a conversation with a Western friend in a cafe, he has been known to pick up the telephone, call the Russian embassy and say simply: "This is Oistrakh. I won't be back for lunch."

Imaginary Orchestra. In Moscow the Oistrakhs live in a six-room flat in a large apartment house where his great friend Prokofiev used to live. He has a passion for gadgets ("toys for big children"), owns a collection of recording machines and a phonograph, although he has regretfully given them up as aids to music teaching ("The student plays, then you play back what he played, then he plays again and the hour goes to pot"). Between teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, making records, editing violin music for the government publishing company and brooding about chess games. Oistrakh sometimes finds leisure to make music with his violinist son Igor, 24, and his wife Tamara, an amateur pianist. And whenever he can, he places himself before the phonograph, waving his arms before an imaginary orchestra. His secret, unfulfilled ambition is to be a conductor.

But most of David Oistrakh's time is spent flying from concert to concert, his Stradivarius slung from one shoulder, his movie camera from the other. "Liszt had enough time to be a great composer and a great virtuoso," he complains, "and he got around on horseback." He gives 25 to 30 concerts a year in Russia, and 30 to 40 abroad. For every appearance in Russia he gets the top 5,000 rubles (his tax is never above 13%), and can keep most of whatever fees he charges for concerts abroad (upwards of $1,000 apiece). Recently, when a U.S. newsman asked him about his high style of living in the workers' state, Oistrakh said: "Great artists always live better. Doesn't Heifetz live better than you?"

Everywhere he goes, Oistrakh is followed by awe-struck reviews, but none of them has been able to isolate the essence of his genius. Accompanist Vladimir Yam-polsky thinks it is "an extra quality that none of the others has," and specifies Oistrakh's uncanny ability to throw himself into the proper mood the instant he begins to play.

Oistrakh himself is beyond analyzing his own appeal. Unlike many great musicians, he does not give the dramatic impression of being possessed by his art or driven by passion; he has the unostentatious, businesslike dedication of a man who simply was not born to do anything else. Once when asked what he did when he wanted to forget music. David Oistrakh replied, a little shocked: "But I don't want to forget music."

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