Milstein Bach

Nathan Milstein plays these magnificent pieces with patrician elegance, easily overcoming their all-but-insurmountable difficulties. His burnished tone has a warmth like that of mahogany, and his fine fingerwork and flawless bowing make for an assured connection of ideas. In the Chaconne to the D minor Partita–which can make even a very good violinist sound overmatched and inept–he zeroes in with the sort of concentration one usually sees in chess champions. Here, as elsewhere in the cycle, Milstein projects not only the music's emotive force, but Bach's grand architecture as well.

The late Nathan Milstein’s 1975 stereo remake (DG mid-price) was his own preferred version of these pillars of the violin repertoire with which he had been so associated since his youth in Odessa. But his (broadly faster) mid-Fifties New York account, now remastered and restored by EMI, was a famous yardstick of its time – a grandly phrased, aristocratically structured, Romantically resonant statement to treasure beside Menuhin and Heifetz. These are epic virtuoso performances justifying Milstein’s view that with this music the performer could ‘bask in the most glamorous light’. Stylistically, purists will object to their expressive liberty and gesture. But few will be able to resist their artistry or intensity of delivery.

Although Nathan Milstein hailed from Odessa, the cradle of Russian violin playing, his personal style was more classical and intellectual in approach than many of his colleagues. By the middle of the twentieth century he had become one of the most renowned violinists in the world, and he did as much as anyone else to imbue Bach's solo violin partitas and sonatas with the rather mystical aura they have presently. Milstein began to study violin at the age of seven. His first teacher was Pyotr Stolyarsky, who remained with him through 1914. Milstein's last recital as a Stolyarsky pupil included another promising student, the five-year-old David Oistrakh. Milstein then went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with Leopold Auer.

Nathan Mironovich Milstein (January 13, 1904 [O.S. December 31, 1903] – December 21, 1992) was a Russian Empire-born American virtuoso violinist.Widely considered one of the finest violinists of the 20th century, Milstein was known for his interpretations of Bach's solo violin works and for works from the Romantic period. He was also known for his long career: he performed at a high level into his mid 80s, retiring only after suffering a broken hand.

Bach’s remarkable Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are revered for their boundless inventiveness, technical ingenuity and emotional depth. With their brilliant preludes, stately dances and complex four-part fugues, the demands on the performer are enormous – from rapid scale passages, double stopping and arpeggios, to the skill and concentration required to create the illusion of separately moving and interweaving voices.