I am afraid that Toscha Seidel (1900–62) was just a name to me before I heard this disc. Wayne Kiley's notes tell me that he was a pupil of Leopold Auer in St Petersburg at a time when Heifetz was also attending the great teacher's classes. In his late teens Seidel went to New York where he was active in concert and on the radio during the 1920s. Later he moved to California and became involved in film work. As Kiley says, he didn't achieve much international recognition, but the usually perceptive Carl Flesch felt this to have been an inJustice.
The impression I gain from this disc is that Seidel was by instinct a virtuoso pure and simple. He certainly possessed a very secure technique and a stronY, clear tone-quality. I see that before the days of electric recording he made a large number of records for American Columbia, but these were of short encore pieces. I do not feel that he was at home in the music of Brahms. His quick, insistent, rather tight vibrato is unvaried and becomes very tiresome. Also his dynamic range is very limited and there is little contrast in his tonequality. There is a kind of generalized expressiveness in his playing, but it seems somehow applied from without: poetry and imagination are not really in evidence.
I enjoyed the delightful Grieg sonata a good deal more. Here Seidel seems more relaxed, and conveys much more sense of enjoyment in a work which makes fewer interpretive demands. Arthur Loesser plays attractively here and in the Brahms his eloquent, thoughtful playing rather shows up the deficiences of his partner. All these recordings were made when Seidel was a young man: I rather fear that his is the familiar case of an artist who showed much promise but failed to reach full maturity. Transfers are good.'