Booklet

Guild GmbH
Switzerland
GHCD 2395
2013 Guild GmbH
© 2013 Guild GmbH
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Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D, Op.61
(cadenzas by Adolf Busch)
I. Allegro ma non troppo 21:48
II. Larghetto 9:24
III. Rondo. Allegro 9:06
ADOLF BUSCH violin
STATSRADIOFONIENS SYMFONIORKESTER
LAUNY GRØNDAHL conductor
Radio Broadcast from the Radiohusets Koncertsal, Copenhagen, 17 March 1949
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Romance in G for Violin and Orchestra, Op.40 6:18
Romance in F for Violin and Orchestra, Op.50 7:44
ADOLF BUSCH violin
WOR RADIO ORCHESTRA
ALFRED WALLENSTEIN conductor
Radio Broadcast from WOR Studios, Newark, 21 February 1942

A GUILD HISTORICAL RELEASE
• Master source: tapes from the collection of Tully Potter and of the BrüderBuschArchiv
in the Max-Reger-Institut, Karlsruhe
• Remastering: Peter Reynolds
• Editing of the Violin Concerto: Antony Hodgson
• Final master preparation: Reynolds Mastering, Colchester, England
• Photos of Launy Grøndahl and Alfred Wallenstein courtesy of The Tully Potter Collection
• Design: Paul Brooks, Design and Print, Oxford
• Repertoire advisor: Dr. Jürgen Schaarwächter, Max-Reger-Institut with BrüderBuschArchiv, Karlsruhe
• Art direction: Guild GmbH
• Executive co-ordination: Guild GmbH
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LAUNY GRØNDAHL
ALFRED WALLENSTEIN
WARNING: Copyright subsists in all recordings under this label. Any unauthorised broadcasting, public
performance, copying or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an infringement of such
copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public performance may be obtained from
Phonographic Performances Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London W1F 9EE.

had to be changed, several bars of music were missed, although all of Busch’s cadenzas were captured.
At the present writer’s suggestion, the record producer Antony Hodgson has inserted passages from the
1942 studio recording to fill the holes. Although it will be apparent to a keen listener where the five gaps
come, this stratagem does at least allow us to hear the 1949 performance straight through. As for Busch’s
interpretation, there is no obvious point-making in the first movement, even in the G minor episode, but
this violinist has a way of getting under the skin of the music without departing from Classical principles.
As in his performances of the late Beethoven quartets, Busch with his legendary long bow strokes can
weight a simple legato line with significance, intensity and spirituality. The Larghetto, which for many
players is no more than an intermezzo, is the heart of the Busch reading: Beethoven’s instruction ‘dolce’
brings rapt concentration, rather than mere sweetness, and in the passage marked to be played on the two
lower strings – where Leonid Kogan and Yehudi Menuhin were always at their best – Busch seems to move
into another world. The finale, in which Busch and Grøndahl create something more substantial than usual
without compromising Beethoven’s bucolic frolic, delights with springy rhythm and spontaneous touches.
In the very month of his New York performances, February 1942, Busch recorded both Beethoven
Romances for the WOR radio station in New York. The orchestra was the station’s own and the conductor
was the WOR director of music, the former cellist Alfred Wallenstein. Although these pieces are not the
equal of the Larghetto in the Concerto, they are very pleasing and satisfying in the hands of a master.
Busch used to play them a good deal before the war – one or other of them would often be included in
his marathon concerto programmes – and he had the full measure of them. His interpretations, utterly
unsentimental, are admirable examples of his superb rhythmic control in slower music, and his haunting
tone is here heard at its best.
© Tully Potter, 2012
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The Beethoven Concerto was the work that the great German violinist Adolf Busch played more often
than any other. At least 400 concert performances are documented; and in 1927, the composer’s
centenary year, he aired his interpretation more than 50 times, not counting the public rehearsals
which were the rule in those days. In 1931 he played it five times under Arturo Toscanini’s baton in the
United States. In all there were six collaborations with Toscanini, at least four with Mengelberg, at least two
with Furtwängler and performances with virtually every other renowned conductor of Busch’s era: Walter,
Weingartner, Muck, Monteux, Krauss, Scherchen, Boult, Wood, Barbirolli, Klemperer and his own elder
brother Fritz. Perhaps the most dramatic was the final one with Toscanini, given at short notice during
the 1939 Lucerne Festival. Bruno Walter, due to direct Mozart’s D minor Concerto from the keyboard
and conduct Mahler’s Second Symphony, was engulfed by a family tragedy and so as not to disappoint the
public, Toscanini and Busch laid on an all-Beethoven programme. The composer Samuel Barber described
Busch’s contribution as ‘the most beautiful performance of the Beethoven Concerto I have ever heard’.
Adolf Busch was born – on 8 August 1891 in Siegen, Westphalia – into a milieu in which everyone
knew his or her place, the old Germany, recently unified by Bismarck but unchanged in its social
conventions for centuries. Coming from a poor background, the Busch brothers had to work for everything
they had. Pianist-conductor Fritz and cellist Herman shared Adolf ’s passion for music: playing with their
father’s ensemble in clubs, bars and other dives was always fun for them, even if it was exhausting (Joseph
Joachim, with whom Adolf was frequently compared, had the same attitude and would make music
morning and night if he could). The adult Adolf Busch would often, in those non-union days, sit in with
the orchestra for a symphony after playing a concerto. On one occasion, having performed Harold in Italy
under Walter, he took the viola obbligato in the Reger edition of Wolf ’s Italian Serenade. He would not have
understood the world-weary, cynical attitude of some modern musicians. He had little formal education
but during his time at the Cologne Conservatory (1902-09) encountered many cultured people who helped
him to educate himself. They included his violin teachers Willy Hess and Bram Eldering, both Joachim
pupils; his composition teacher Fritz Steinbach, Brahms’s favourite conductor; his future father-in-law
Hugo Grüters, director of music in Bonn; and the composer Max Reger, who was astonished when the
17-year-old Busch played his hour-long concerto to him from memory.
Busch chose the Brahms Concerto for his important early débuts and was already two years into his
career when he essayed his first major performance of the Beethoven, in Vienna on 17 October 1911 with
his mentor Steinbach conducting: afterwards he was called back to the platform eight times. On 7 February
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1912 he played it under Reger’s direction in Pforzheim, with the touring Meiningen Court Orchestra.
His fiancée Frieda Grüters wrote home: ‘Reger told me Adolf is taking the place of Joachim; he has never
heard the Concerto played in such a way.’ On 28 October 1912 Busch gave his first London rendering of
the Concerto, with the LSO under Steinbach, again to acclaim; and from then on he was recognised as the
work’s finest exponent. Early in 1913, as the new leader of the Konzertverein Orchestra (and its quartet),
he mesmerised the Viennese audience and conductor Walter with his solo in the ‘Benedictus’ of the Missa
solemnis. During the Great War, from his base in Vienna, Busch continued to tour the countries open to
him and consolidated his reputation in central Europe as soloist and quartet leader. When peace came he
was called to Joachim’s old teaching post in Berlin and became the busiest musician of his eminence in the
world, giving a concert almost every night. One evening it might be a concerto, the next a quartet recital,
the next a sonata programme with his partner Rudolf Serkin. He used his earnings as a soloist to subsidise
his chamber music and put on a dazzling array of repertoire in his recitals – duos, trios, quartets, quintets,
sextets, septets, octets. He was a pioneer of the chamber orchestra revival, experimenting with pick-up
groups as early as 1916, although not until 1935 did he lead the regular ensemble of friends and pupils
with which he performed and recorded Bach and Mozart. His summers were spent in relaxation – walking
and climbing were favourite pastimes – and in composition. When the crisis of 1933 came, he was on the
books of three publishers, Simrock, Breitkopf und Härtel and Eulenburg.
As early as 1927, seeing how things were going politically in Germany, Adolf and Frieda Busch moved
to Basel with their little daughter Irene and Serkin, who though only 12 years younger was like a son to
them (he later married Irene). When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Busch was affronted by the insults
and injustices meted out to the Jews. After experiencing anti-Semitic demonstrations against Serkin and
the boycott of Jewish shops in Berlin on 1 April, he called it a day. He would not return to Germany, even as
a visitor, for another 16 years. At a stroke he halved his income, said farewell to real success as a composer
and lost his most appreciative audiences. In 1938 he boycotted Italy, where he was hugely popular, for
similar reasons. The move to the United States, where being a Herr Professor Doktor counted for nothing
and there was anti-German feeling – due not just to the war but to the stranglehold an earlier generation
of Austro-German musicians had exerted on American music – was traumatic for him. Little interest was
shown in him as a soloist and he ended up touring the country with a conductorless chamber orchestra,
similar to the one he had led in Europe. Even here he was a pioneer, performing Schütz, Gabrieli, Purcell,
Corelli and Rameau alongside his beloved Bach and Mozart. His performances and recordings of Handel’s
Concerti grossi were among his finest achievements. In 1950 he helped to found the Marlboro summer
school in Vermont, which still flourishes. He died at nearby Guilford on 9 June 1952.
The saga of efforts to record Adolf Busch in the Beethoven Concerto was frustrating. By the late 1920s
HMV and Columbia were vying for a recording: the former suggested using the Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra
under Volkmar Andreae, then in the spring of 1930 actually booked the LSO, but Busch’s agents (prompted
by his wife) objected to his being put on the cheaper plum label when his pupil Yehudi Menuhin was on
the red label. Busch’s boycott of Germany from 1933 removed one of the main markets for a recording and
so the situation arose where the Beethoven Concerto was available from German fiddlers such as Georg
Kulenkampff, Max Strub and Riele Queling but not from the master. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1939,
Busch was ignored by RCA Victor, who had a reciprocal arrangement with his European label HMV; but
he was courted by Columbia and once he was over a 1940 heart attack, he began recording with Serkin
and his quartet. Early in 1942, Fritz Busch conducted the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in a series
of concerts for the orchestra’s centennial season at Carnegie Hall, and Adolf was soloist in four. On 29
and 30 January he introduced New Yorkers to the Reger Concerto, in his own manuscript reworking, but
most critics rejected it. On 7 and 8 February the Busch brothers again collaborated with the Philharmonic-
Symphony, in the Beethoven Concerto, Adolf airing a new set of cadenzas written the previous year. The
Sunday-afternoon CBS network broadcast was taken down by two home recordists and one of those
documents has been released. It is an admirable corrective to the official Columbia recording, made
next day at Liederkranz Hall. Unfortunately the production was delegated to the inexperienced Goddard
Lieberson. Busch was palpably under strain in the opening movement, his nervousness exacerbated by
Lieberson’s insisting he stand on a raised platform, which made him feel remote from his brother and the
orchestra and brought him too close to the microphone. The resulting poor balance caused him to reject
the recording, which was not issued until after his death. Had it been released at the time, it would have
enhanced his reputation, as despite its faults it is one of the great readings of the Concerto.
The frustration continued when, on 17 March 1949, Busch played the Concerto at the Radiohusets
Koncertsal, Copenhagen, with the Danish State Radio Symphony Orchestra under Launy Grøndahl.
The violinist was in terrific form, his big golden tone shining forth, and the orchestral musicians – with
whom he was well acquainted from many visits to the Danish capital – gave him wholehearted support,
as did their fine conductor. Sadly, Danish State Radio had not yet acquired tape recording facilities; and
only one turntable was in operation for taking the performance down on discs: thus every time a disc
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