It is not news that Nathan Milstein is a wizard of the violin. Certainly not in Orchestra hall where he has played countless recitals, and where Thursday night he celebrated his 20th season with the Chicago Symphony orchestra, playing the Brahms Concerto with his own slashing, demon-ridden cadenza melting into the high, pale, pure and lovely song with which a violinist unlocks the heart of the music, or forever finds it closed.

There was about that song something incandescent, for this Brahms was Milstein at white heat. Not the noblest performance we have heard him play, or the most spacious, or even the most eloquent. Those would be reserved for the orchestra's great nights when the soloist can surpass himself. This time the orchestra gave him some superb support fired by response to his own high mood. But he had in Walter Hendl a willing conductor able only up to a point.

That is, when Mr. Milstein thrust straight to the core of the music, sparks flying, bow shredding, violin singing, glittering and sometimes spitting, Mr. Hendl could go along. But Mr. Hendl does not go straight to any point. He flounders and lets music sprawl. There was in the Brahms none of the mysterious and marvelous alchemy by which a great conductor can bring soloist, orchestra and music to ultimate fusion. So we had some dazzling and memorable Milstein, but not great Brahms.

The concert opened with another big romantic score, Schumann's Overture to Manfred, which suffered fate, this time with orchestral thrusts to the Byronic point to keep it afloat. Hindemith's joust with Weber tunes was a considerably more serious misfortune, for it demands translucent textures, buoyant rhythms, and astringent wit. It got the kind of scrambled, coarsened performance that can happen to best of orchestras when the man with the baton lacks technique and style.