Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, 1953

I’m listening to Nathan Milstein playing Bach’s Partita in D minor. The Library of Congress Recital, 1953. Last night I turned the house upside down to find it, and the glove box of the car, too. Nothing else would do. Not a different recording, not even a YouTube of the man himself playing it—too distracting. Having just spent the better part of three months fussing over the minute details of a recording of my Irish trio, I need to hear this recording—the one that leaped out of the speakers, so shockingly alive the first time I heard it—for some perspective on musical priorities.

The first thing you notice is how bad the recording quality is. That impression lasts about two seconds before Milstein captures you, as he captivated his audience 56 years ago—something to consider in this age of digital recording, where tone can be almost a matter of choice (and still not quite sound like a violin), and the tiniest detail can be “fixed,” literally to the millisecond. Played that note better somewhere else? Let’s just grab it. As a wise friend said of recording, “It will take as long as it can.”

Ten minutes into the last movement, the great Chaconne, something fell in the auditorium. (We would edit out a string squeak, an out-of-place breath.) Someone coughs as the piece spirals up and up, soaring, seeking one last time before the final statement of the theme. Hopelessly tangled in Bach’s elaborately woven web, do you even hear the coughing?

Imagine looking at the less-than-perfect photo of a loved one. Do you see the blur, or do the beloved eyes leap out of the picture?

The violin sounds distant, almost strident. Milstein owned two Strads and a del Gesù during his career; this was surely one of them. But can we hear the instrument’s distinctive (and, nowadays, stratospherically expensive) voice? Unfortunately not. Do we miss it? I don’t know. Musicians are often encouraged to commit more resources on instruments and bows than we can possibly afford. And yet, Milstein’s powerful opening phrases strike the listener almost like a blow, and the bubbling passages of the Allemande tumble like water shortly after.

Milstein’s pitch is less than perfect in some passages, as someone rather sourly pointed out in a chat-room discussion of the recording. Nobody could get away with that these days . . . Of course perfection is a laudable goal, something to strive for. But what is perfect, anyway? As the fretless musician trying to compute the average pitch of two fretted instruments with every single note, I’m sorely aware that sometimes it doesn’t exist. And is perfect enough? Should the Library of Congress recording be auto-tuned and reissued? Would the great Russian soloist be any more great?

What else is there to hear? For me, the room, the Coolidge Auditorium in the US Library of Congress. In an odd twist of fate, I once spent a week in this room, listening to the history of violin-making in America being told for the first time during The American Violin, a joint program of the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. I fell in love with the violin and its story, its people, and with my own country in a way that I hadn’t before.

So, when I listen to this Milstein recording, I hear echoes of their voices in that room, their stories. I also hear Mark Summer during the Turtle Island Quartet concert (part of the festivities), alternating between the Smithsonian’s Strad cello and his own Joe Grubaugh & Sigrun Seifert, drawing the strains of John Coltrane out of both—the ultimate test for any instrument maker.

The Americans held up pretty darn well against old Cremona. I can still see their delighted faces, sitting off to my left.