Resourceful Russians

On the stage of Brussels' Palais des Beaux Arts before 2,000 cheering fans, master and pupil embraced, close to tears at the hour of their triumph. After a life of study, three weeks of merciless competition, and a midnight wait for the jury's decision, a young Russian violinist named Alexei Michlin had won last week's Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition, and there to share in the glory of it all was his teacher, David Oistrakh.

With $12,000 in prize money and the guarantee of at least a briefly successful career at stake, 34 of the world's best young violinists had entered the 10th Queen Elisabeth, the most glamorous of all the music competitions. The stiff preliminaries had winnowed the competitors down to twelve--including four Russians and four Americans. But in the finals, the Russians were the masters of the younger and shakier Americans, whose main virtue was the exuberant individualism of their playing. When the prizes were announced, the Russians took first, second, fourth and ninth; the Americans placed third, fifth, eleventh and twelfth.

The Russian triumph turned attention to the sort of rigorous training young Soviet virtuosi grow up on and the day seemed especially bright for Oistrakh: of the winners at Brussels, three are his very own pupils. The Russian superiority, critics agreed, involved fidelity to the music, discipline--and the kind of maturity that let Michlin, 24, quickly snatch up the concertmaster's violin and go on playing when a string in his own instrument broke during his performance of a concerto written especially for the occasion.

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