How has nobody mentioned Maxin Vengerov???!!!
No one but the OP’s mentioned Yehudi Menuhin.
Yehudi Menuhin, IIRC, had a rather undisciplined bowing style and is considered not as technically proficient as many of the top top violinists. He had an enormous expressive style which more than made up for it, though. He was a cool man, though – I have a lot of the stuff he did with Ravi Shankar.
If you are interested in learning about some of the best violinists of the twentieth century, I would recommend the movie Art of Violin, hosted by Itzhak Perlman. I once caught it on the Trio channel (IIRC) and was utterly transfixed for the whole movie.
I saw Gil Shaham play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Kreisler cadenza. It was pretty incredible. For those of you who don’t know, the Kreisler cadenza is almost all double-stops, where he is playing both the primary and secondary themes at the same time in harmony. Afterwards, at the curtain call, he stood there, casually swinging a many million dollar Stradivarius from his index finger curled under the scroll.
If you ever have a chance to watch any Paganinni violin concerto performed, you should jump at it. The obvious fireworks in those concerti are pretty stunning to watch, and his music doesn’t suffer from the virtuosity (unlike a lot of other harder stuff IMHO). I saw a 14 year old Korean girl (Yura Lee) once play the famous one (D major I think) from student seats in the third row. Got to watch the ricochet bowing and the fast descending scales of forced harmonics from up close. Pretty damn cool.
Josef Suk
I’ll add David Oistrakh.