Heifetz was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Vilna, Lithuania then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Reuven Heifetz, son of Elie, was a local violin teacher and served as the concertmaster of the Vilnius Theatre Orchestra for one season before the theatre closed down. While Jascha was an infant, his father did a series of tests, observing how his son responded to his fiddling. This convinced him that Jascha had great potential, and before Jascha was two years old, his father bought him a small violin, and taught him bowing and simple fingering.

Heifetz made his first recordings in Russia during 1910-11, while still a student of Leopold Auer. The existence of these recordings was not widely known until after Heifetz's death, when several sides, including Francois Schubert's L'Abeille, were reissued on an LP included as a supplement to The Strad magazine.  Shortly after his Carnegie Hall debut on 7 November 1917, Heifetz made his first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company/RCA Victor where he would remain for most of his career. For several years, in the 1930s, Heifetz recorded primarily for HMV in the UK because RCA Victor cut back on expensive classical recording sessions during the Great Depression; these discs were issued in the US by RCA Victor. Heifetz often enjoyed playing chamber music. Various critics have blamed his limited success in chamber ensembles to the fact that his artistic personality tended to overwhelm his colleagues. Some notable collaborations include his 1941 recordings of piano trios by Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms with cellist Emanuel Feuermann and pianist Arthur Rubinstein as well as a later collaboration with Rubinstein and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, with whom he recorded trios by Maurice Ravel, Tchaikovsky, and Felix Mendelssohn. Both formations were sometimes referred to as the Million Dollar Trio. Heifetz also recorded some string quintets with violinist Israel Baker, violists William Primrose and Virginia Majewski, and Piatigorsky.  He recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto in 1940 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, and again in stereo in 1955 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch. A live performance of an NBC radio broadcast from 9 April 1944, of Heifetz playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, has also been released.  He performed and recorded Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto at a time when Korngold's scoring of numerous films for Warner Brothers prompted many classical musicians to develop the scarcely warranted opinion that Korngold was not a "serious" composer and to avoid his music in order to avoid being associated with him.

Answer the following question by taking a quote from the article: When was his last music recorded?