Now eighty-five years old and in retirement, the Russian-born violinist Nathan Milstein has enjoyed an important career extending over sixty years and more. Living in the West during this time, he achieved a rank just below such princes of the instrument as Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz. Now, his playing career over, he is presenting us with his recollections of a very busy life. One must assume that he is no writer, for in his memoirs he has been assisted by Solomon Volkov, a Soviet émigré best known in the West for bringing out Testimony, the memoirs of the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In the case of the Shostakovich memoirs, Mr. Volkov performed his task of midwife after the composer’s death; the fruits of this unorthodox collaboration, though clearly true in the largest sense, did present the reader with a problem of separating the voice of Mr. Volkov from the voice of Shostakovich. Not surprisingly, this problem exists for the reader of Mr. Milstein’s recollections as well.
The Shostakovich memoirs, of course, dealt with the twentieth-century relationship between totalitarian politics and the resulting human and artistic tragedies. By contrast, the Milstein memoirs are a chatty collection of happy personal anecdotes and of musical judgments, mostly routine, but often sharply critical and sometimes merely curious. Among the more curious judgments is Mr. Milstein’s rejection of the Brahms Violin Concerto as a great work; furthermore, he abhors all the music of Igor Stravinsky written after The Rite of