Jascha Heifetz

I believe you should never be so empirical about music and of course Paganini but Heifetz should appear in the list of greats and you can get better recordings of him than Paganini :)

For 83 of his 86 years, Jascha Heifetz (1901-87) played the violin, and for over 60 of them in front of audiences the length and breadth of the world. Since his first public concert in St. Petersburg on April 30, 1911, he exposed his art to the world through more than 2,000,000 miles of travel (much of it in front of World War II troops), a prodigious recording program, countless appearances on radio, in several films, an hour-long television special and, for a dozen years, a vigorous teaching schedule.

http://www.jaschaheifetz.com/index.html