Chopin Nocturne for Violin by Seidel

There is a moment in Toscha Seidel’s release of the Chopin nocturne — arranged by his teacher Leopold Auer with the kind of tasteful restraint that distinguished Auer’s editorial hand from the more interventionist Kreisler school — where the violin seems simply to breathe. Not ornament. Not display. Breathe. It stops you.

Seidel has been a ghost at the feast of early violin discography for too long. His name surfaces occasionally in the footnotes — Carl Flesch, never a man to waste a compliment, argued that Efrem Zimbalist had been unjustly elevated above him in the Auer hierarchy, leaving Seidel outside the famous trinity of Heifetz, Elman, and Zimbalist — but his recordings have circulated mainly as curiosities in anthology packages, glimpsed rather than heard. This Biddulph reissue of his American Columbia sessions from 1918 to 1921 is the corrective we needed.

The historical context matters here. Columbia was after Heifetz’s blood. Victor had signed the nineteen-year-old Lithuanian prodigy in 1917, and his first recordings caused the kind of sensation that reshaped the entire industry’s sense of what the violin could do. Columbia needed a rival, and they found one in Seidel — himself barely out of his teens, himself an Auer product, himself possessed of a artistry so apparently effortless that the word “nonchalant” keeps suggesting itself. Whether Seidel was actually Columbia’s answer to Heifetz is a question these recordings can’t quite resolve. But they pose it seriously.

The tone is the first thing. Molten is the right word — not the silvery, slightly astringent beauty Heifetz commanded even in his acoustic recordings, but something warmer, more amber-colored, vibrated with a fervency that occasionally tips toward the overripe. The Wieniawski “Romance” walks that edge. Seidel loves it almost too much; the vibrato widens in the upper positions until sentiment threatens to become sentimentality. He pulls back just in time, which is either superb instinct or very good luck, and probably both.

What’s more interesting — and more revealing of an actual artistic mind at work — is what he does with Schumann’s “Träumerei.” Here the fervency disappears entirely. The tone narrows, the vibrato tightens, and something almost Classical in its poise takes over. This chaste refinement, as one wants to call it, sits oddly with the lush Wieniawski. It is, in fact, the quality Flesch associated with Zimbalist — the very quality he thought too cool, too bloodless. Seidel apparently had access to both registers, which makes him more interesting than either his admirers or detractors have suggested.

The rhythmic elasticity — this is where reasonable people can disagree. Kreisler’s rubato was structural, a kind of composed flexibility that felt inevitable in retrospect. Seidel’s is more improvisatory, sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes merely willful. The Kreisler “Caprice Viennois” makes the point clearly: there’s real élan in it, genuine tonal breadth, but the rhythmic liberties accumulate past the point of expressivity into something that starts to feel like restlessness. One wants him to trust the music a little more.

Jacob Sandler’s “Eili, Eili” is a surprise. Given how emotionally direct the piece is — a Yiddish melody of real grief — you might expect Seidel to pour everything on. He doesn’t. The vibrato is controlled, the expression curiously reserved, as though he’s honoring the melody by not editorializing it to death. It’s the most unexpected moment on the disc, and possibly the most moving.

Three pieces here use small orchestral accompaniment — the Cui miniatures and two Tchaikovsky arrangements, including a lovely transcription of the famous Andante cantabile from the String Quartet No. 1 in D major. The orchestral textures are necessarily thin in acoustic recording, but Seidel adjusts, projecting with a directness that the piano-accompanied pieces don’t always require.

Biddulph’s transfers are clean. The surface noise has been managed without the over-processing that turns acoustic recordings into things that sound like they’re being performed inside a pillow. You can hear the bow arm, which matters enormously — these are players for whom the right hand was a whole expressive vocabulary, not just a motor.

Seidel’s later career — radio work, film studio dates, the long West Coast years — has tended to make him seem like a talent that dissipated into commerce. These recordings argue otherwise. He was, in 1918, a violinist of genuine stature, not merely a Heifetz surrogate. That he didn’t become Heifetz is hardly a criticism. Nobody became Heifetz. What he became, at his best, was himself — which is rarer than it sounds, and more than enough.