Music: A Master

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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.