PERFORMANCE ART : Jascha Heifetz: A CD Performance : The new RCA Victor set contains every commercial recording the violinist made.

Jascha Heifetz (1900-1987) hasn’t been out of the public conscious ness since his debut in St. Pe tersburg in 1911. And he never will be if RCA Victor, his longtime recording company, has anything to say about it.

The company has now spoken more loudly and voluminously than ever with the always ear-boggling, often soul-stirring and on more than a few occasions exasperating “Heifetz Collection”: 65 CDs selling at around $600 but soon to be broken up into more manageable one- and two-disc bits.

The set purports to include every commercial recording the violinist made, from the encore pieces the Vilna, Lithuania, teen-ager set down (acoustically) on Nov. 9, 1917, at the Victor Studios in Camden, N.J., to the live taping of his final recital, with pianist Brooks Smith, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oct. 23, 1972.

It’s easy for critics to talk about money since we don’t spend it--on recordings at any rate--but the complete collection, at any price, might serve as a cornerstone of a library of historic recordings. Not all of it is “good”--in the sense of combining technique, taste and style appropriate to the music under consideration--but it does document the accomplishments of an artist whose likes we will probably never see and hear again and who, rather than being representative of an era, represented himself.

The marvel is that the self encountered in the playing (the only one we’re concerned with) could at times represent the music better than an artist more dedicated to immersing himself in the composer’s world. Heifetz was always Heifetz; if he could also be Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Walton, Bruch, Mozart, so much the better.

What you get from Heifetz is total command of the instrument and total control of the music. No one complained about the former: The Heifetz technique remains a source of wonderment even for those who felt that his need to control a score squeezed the life out of it.

How, violinists still ask, could anyone apply so much pressure to the strings without producing the most god-awful scratching? How, applying all that pressure, could he execute such a quick release to maintain rhythm and pitch?

Critics have raged for decades over how much “heart” there was in Heifetz’s playing, said heart to many observers indicated by how much smiling he did during a concert: little, at best. Or how much schmaltz he applied to music that demanded it: Bruch, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky.

The answer: very little--if schmaltz meant slow vibrato, line-destroying rubato, slushy portamento. Heifetz may have been a Romantic in his repertory tastes, but he was so dry-eyed in his projection of Romantic scores that they emerged taut and tart, their fat content diminished, their lyricism intact.

Where to start in praising the totality? At the top, in the realm of revelation, with the Beethoven Violin Concerto--not the businesslike 1955 job with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony (keep in mind that having the entire collection allows this kind of endlessly fascinating comparison) but the 1940 live broadcast, with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony--and with Brahms’ Sonata in D-minor with pianist William Kapell, recorded in RCA’s Hollywood studios in 1950.

The Beethoven Concerto should be a disaster, what with those two immense egos, Heifetz and Toscanini, in their first and last collaboration, set to go their separate ways, which to an extent they do. But they do it at the same tempo--neither was out to show up the other and Beethoven be damned in the process. The big Romantic expressive gestures were never over-employed by Heifetz and never employed, period, by Toscanini. Whatever the artists’ personal quirks, they’re indulged only when each has center stage. When they must work as a team, the results are simply breathtaking.

Find me (I dare you!) a more magical interpretation of those sublime (even in less-sensitive hands) dozen measures following the first movement cadenza (Heifetz’s tarting up of Joachim’s hardly shy showpiece), the soloist producing a heart-stoppingly lovely little portamento with what is at once the most slender and succulent violin tone imaginable, and the orchestra (on Beethoven’s authority) spinning out an almost imperceptibly swelling cantilena, matching and enveloping the piercingly sweet violin, with the NBC’s cello section and solo bassoonist adding their gentle magic.

The reputations of Heifetz and Toscanini as the most impatient and intolerant of taskmasters are seriously at risk here and in the ensuing slow movement.

And don’t think (as I did) that you’ve heard it all before in the numerous previous revivals of this immortal, controversial relic. RCA’s latest re-mastering allows us to hear the totality with a clarity absent since the original 78 rpm pressings. Instead of making the filtering of extraneous noise their end-all, RCA’s present technical team, supervised by John Pfeiffer, gives us the full force of the Heifetz tone with a hitherto hidden amount of orchestral detail.

The beauty of the Heifetz-Kapell Brahms Sonata is the like-mindedness of the players, with Heifetz never the domineering senior partner. And, again, we have in the violinist’s playing that seemingly now-lost combination of rhythmic aggressiveness and the expressive bending of line, all within the context of a fierily dramatic overall view of music.

Some other personal favorites: the very grand and intense Brahms Double Concerto from 1939 with cellist Emanuel Feuermann and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy; both recordings (1951,1962) of the Bruch G-minor Concerto conducted by Malcolm Sargent--prime examples of the violinist’s ability to refresh tired scores with his clarity of exposition.

Likewise, both versions of the Walton Concerto--written for Heifetz--with Eugene Goossens’ superbly lithe conducting (1941) and led more chunkily in 1950 by the composer, but in both instances a more edgily modern work than subsequent interpreters would have us believe.

Heifetz’s Mozart performances have perhaps not been listened to lately by their stauncher foes. “Style” in the scholarly sense may not have had much to do with the two recordings, for instance, of the D-major Concerto (1947, with Beecham, 1962 with Sargent), or the 1956 teaming with violist William Primrose in the Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, but their lack of affectation and their rhythmic energy set them far apart and far above the precious horrors routinely perpetrated by contemporaneous Legendary Violinists.

Heifetz as a chamber music performer, in which role he appeared with increasing frequency in his later years, appealed less to chamber music aficionados than to die-hard Heifetzniks. There isn’t much in his chamber output that I care to live with, what with his lording it over his supposed colleagues in such peremptory fashion as in the pushy 1960s versions of the Mendelssohn Octet and Dvorak Piano Quintet, trios by Schubert and Brahms, etc.

Nor is there much to commend in Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio from 1941, with Heifetz not at all the aggressor but at one with his fellow members of the “Million Dollar Trio,” an aristocratically aloof Artur Rubinstein and a bored-sounding Feuermann. There’s much more life in the 1950 version of the megabuck trio, with Gregor Piatigorsky replacing the deceased Feuermann, in a powerful, propulsive interpretation (despite cuts) of the Tchaikovsky Trio.

And Heifetz--at his most sweet-toned, even sentimental--with some inspired co-conspirators, pianist Jesus Maria Sanroma and the Musical Arts Quartet, work the minor miracle of giving shape (in 1941) to Chausson’s egregiously perfumed Concerto.

Occupying a special place, obviously, is that final 1972 recital--recorded live, without post-concert studio retouching. There are more little intonational flubs, even outright wrong notes from the 72-year-old violinist in the 50 minutes of the Franck and Richard Strauss Sonatas, to mention only the big works on the program, than in the rest of these 65 CDs combined. Which still means, if you can believe it, not many at all.

What remains is Heifetz’s incomparable rhythmic strength and gloriously in-your-face tone, his refusal to cut technical corners. And quite possibly the belief, perceptible on countless occasions during the five decades of mastery presented here, that there is no such thing as minor music, only minor musicians--among whom Jascha Heifetz, even in the minds of his most determined detractors, could never be numbered.