PERFORMING ARTS: CLASSICAL MUSIC, DANCE, OPERA : The Stern Treatment : The latest offerings in CBS-Sony’s 44-CD retrospective of the master violinist’s career concentrate on chamber music.

That Isaac Stern will be giving a recital tonight at the Music Center--7:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--is not exactly hot news. After all, he’s been playing the hall virtually since it opened 30 years ago, which represents merely half the time he’s been playing in public. Longevity is the man’s middle name, and the term is no less applicable to his relationship with the CBS/Columbia--now Sony--label, for which he has recorded exclusively for a staggering half-century.

As this column has already noted, Sony is giving Stern the living legend treatment, releasing 44 mid-price CDs that trace his long history with the label. The latest offerings in the retrospective series, which is called “Isaac Stern: A Life in Music,” bear particular witness to the fact that Stern is the 20th century master violinist most closely identified with chamber music.

By age 15, Stern had already read much of this repertory with first-chair players of the San Francisco Symphony, whose concertmaster, Naoum Blinder, was his principal teacher.

At 16, in 1936, young Isaac began his career officially, which means as soloist with orchestra and in recitals. In those distant days, chamber music wasn’t the big, profitable business it is today, and name soloists were rarely to be found among its practitioners.

By the late-1950s, however, and the beginning of the so-called classical music explosion in the United States, the time was ripe for chamber music on a grand scale, involving star performers. The trend toward permanently constituted glamour ensembles may well have its beginnings in 1960, with the formation of the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio (with cellist Leonard Rose and pianist Eugene Istomin). Their concerts quickly became an integral part of seasons at major American and European concert venues, and remained so for one glorious decade.

The Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio was in a sense oddly assorted: Stern, with his huge, throbbing tone and Romantic proclivities; Istomin’s, lower-voltage, more classically oriented pianism; and Rose, seemingly listening only to his own calm, rhythmically precise voice, yet such an instinctive ensemble player that one always felt his presence.

The S-R-I Trio hardly represented the presumed chamber-music ideal of several minds thinking and several hearts beating as one. Rather, they were individuals contributing their separate ideas to a meaningful whole, creating the tension without which a performance remains earthbound.

To this listener, the threesome’s supreme masterpieces are in a two-disc compilation (64 615) comprising the Schubert Trios, in B flat and E flat, the Mozart Piano Quartet, K. 493, and Haydn’s Trio No. 10.

In the Mozart, recorded at the Casals Festival in 1957 (that is, pre-S-R-I), Istomin and Stern are joined by the Budapest Quartet’s cellist, Mischa Schneider, and violist Milton Katims. If there are grander, more penetrating and profoundly satisfying recorded performances of the Schubert trios, they haven’t come my way.

The rewards are in large part attributable to the fact that, between episodes demanding airtight ensemble unity, Schubert allows each player much individual expression. And as a soloist, each of these musicians is at his peak, dreaming away to his heart’s content, with Stern pouring out a flood of powerful, richly colored tone. Was there ever a violinist who could maintain the musical pulse so effectively without settling into rhythmic rigidity?

The little-known Haydn trio is a revelation, not only for Istomin’s bracing energy (Haydn’s emphasis is on the piano), but for the work’s placement on the CD as prelude to Schubert’s trio in the same key of E flat. Haydn, in 10 delirious minutes, touches on as many distant tonalities as Schubert does in his three-quarters of an hour. The Mozart quartet is a marvel of ensemble interaction and shows Stern as an instinctively stylish Mozart player long before a “correct” Mozart style had been propounded by the period-performance people.

The violinist’s occasional excesses of vibrato and bow-pressure are, surprisingly, seldom encountered in his performances of the classical repertory. Rather, they occur when they constitute too much of the right thing, say, in the two Mendelssohn Trios (64 519), where Stern’s throb-and-sob sound positively makes the teeth ache.

In the early Beethoven trios (64 510, two CDs), in which the piano is given the dominant role and where Istomin sparkles, Stern is the ideal partner (Rose doesn’t have much to do). Their combined efforts create the most high-spirited and technically accomplished interpretations of these elusive works on recordings. While among the late trios (64 513, two CDs), we have a touchstone interpretation of the “Archduke” that, as in the similarly constructed Schubert trios, shows three artists working on the highest level individually and together.

Brahms’ chamber music doesn’t rank among the delights of my life, which may make my comments regarding its presentation here irrelevant. But it’s difficult to imagine even die-hard fans (of Brahms and S-R-I) not being put off by Istomin’s mannered statements (too much rubato) of the innocent opening theme of Op. 8 or the principal theme of the Op. 87 first movement.

The Brahms trios share a three-CD box (64 520) with the three Brahms Piano Quartets, the most recent recordings in the lot, all made during the past decade. But not by the old team: Rose died in 1984 and the Stern-Istomin partnership ended, for whatever reasons, some years ago as well.

Here, Stern enlists pianist Emanuel Ax; Jaime Laredo, trading his customary violin for the viola; and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The results are on the cool side, which is quite OK with this dissenter. The fact that Stern’s tone is less commanding these days may be advantageous in this instance, as is the fact that Ma’s usual ebullience-- and wide vibrato--is held in check in present company.

The curiosity among these chamber releases is an early-18th century program (64 509) culled from recordings made between 1981 and 1989, in which Stern shares top billing with flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. Cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Leslie Parnas and lutenist Matthias Spaeter make cameo appearances, with John Steele Ritter attending to the keyboard continuo.

Rampal is his fluent self throughout, and Stern is better attuned to the repertory at this stage of his career than he was in earlier times. But his sound is still rather clotted for the likes of the Trio Sonata from J.S. Bach’s “Musical Offering”; intonation is dicey in a Trio Sonata by W.F. Bach. And why Stern, or anyone, would wish to be involved in such piffle as the J.C. Bach pieces included here is beyond me.

As if to wash away the taste of that program, Sony included in my chamber shipment an earlier release in the Stern series: a coupling of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius Concertos with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra as hand-in-glove partners, recorded in 1958 and 1969, respectively. I rose to the bait, and was thrilled again by the combination of nobility and tension, by the affection and glowing tone Stern brings to these familiar, often abused scores (66 829).

Bless you, Isaac.