Rudy Toth

Toth, Rudy

Rudy Toth. Composer, arranger, conductor, pianist, cimbalom player, b Stare Karasnow, Czechoslovakia, 16 Dec 1925, d Lisle, Ont, 9 Jul 2009. As a child Rudy Toth played cimbalom for his father, Carl. During the 1940s he attended the Toronto Conservatory of Music (Royal Conservatory of Music) where his teachers were Boris Berlin (piano), John Weinzweig (harmony), and Ettore Mazzoleni (conducting); concurrently he worked in the Toronto dance bands of Stan Patton, Ellis McLintock, Bert Niosi, and others. He studied piano in Paris with Gaby Casadesus in 1950 and completed his conducting studies with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood and Walter Susskind in Toronto.

Rudy Toth began his CBC career in the late 1940s as pianist for Howard Cable, had his own radio show in 1951, and worked until ca 1965 as music director for CBC TV shows starring Joan Fairfax, Wally Koster, Denny Vaughan, and others. In the mid-1960s Toth turned increasingly to the writing of jingles, 1965-70 in partnership with his brother Jerry Toth, Dolores Claman, and Richard Morris as Quartet Productions, and 1970-80 with Jerry as Seven-O Productions.

Toth's later assignments in TV included the orchestration (with Jerry) and conducting of the CBS production of Once Upon the Brothers Grimm (an Emmy Award nominee), and of several CBC specials. Toth played piano with Nimmons 'N' Nine in the late 1950s and performed on the cimbalom in works by Bartók, Kodály, and Stravinsky, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Ottawa Philharmonic, the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra, and the Ivan Romanoff Orchestra. Rudy Toth retired in 1989.

His wife was the violinist Josephine Chuchman.

See also Tony Toth (his brother).