I have heard Oistrakh perform many, many times, but not once has he ever failed. Once, a few years ago in Berlin, I stayed in the hotel room next to his. In two days' time he was to give a performance of Chaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Of course, Oistrakh had played it hundreds of times before, yet he practised it day and night, as though he were about to perform it for the first time. I think I would be correct in saying that it was this combination of enormous talent and unremitting work, of inspiration and polished skill, that earned Oistrakh fame as ‘the king of the violinists’ or the ‘world’s first violin’, as he is called abroad