"What the Busch Quartet brought us on Saturday was a poignant Beethoven event that cannot often be experienced in such perfection and devotion to the work. We were – which we are not often blessed with today – able to enjoy Beethoven once again as a primeval phenomenon, and there was no gap between the composer and the interpretation of his music through his representatives, an ensemble that does not know anything but cultivation of and service at the work; a straight path leads via the personalities of the interpreters directly to the master, to the personality of Beethoven." - Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, 13 February 1951

The legendary Busch Quartet returned briefly to Germany in 1951 with plans for a more comprehensive tour the following year. Alas the ill health of leader Adolf Busch led to the disbanding of the quartet later in 1951, and we are left with tapes of a handful of German radio broadcasts.

Here we present, in superb sound quality, the four Beethoven quartet broadcasts of Quartets Nos. 1, 9, 13 and 14, together with a Capriccio by Mendelssohn, all broadcast live in January and February 1951, and a rare opportunity to hear this most highly regarded ensemble in the music which defined them, unconstrained by the stops and starts of the 78rpm record. An unmissable treasure!

"The tempo was right this time and the tutti sounded with all the nuances required. Toscanini did not miss one tiny detail. He was right there, and we finished every phrase beautifully together. He respected all my dynamics, held up the orchestra where I made the tiniest rubato, came in after the cadenza on the dot, and we finished the movement with a flourish. The second movement went smoothly . . . because the music is a wonderful dialogue between the piano and the orchestra. The third movement was worked out very professionally and with bravura by the Maestro." - Artur Rubinstein

In his 101 broadcast performances of Beethoven with the NBC Symphony Orchestra only four were given of the piano concertos. This release brings together those four recordings, together with radio commentary, in new XR remastered Ambient Stereo sound.

The soloists Ania Dorfmann, Dame Myra Hess, Artur Rubinstein and Rudolf Serkin all shine, and one could only wish for more. As it is these recordings, from 1944 and 1946, have a vibrancy and life often subdued in the equivalent studio recordings. They're essential additions to any collection.

"A splendid evening: an evening of the most intellectual, most confident music making and the highest orchestral culture. To some people Fritz Busch's way of conducting may seem cool and too precise. But what a glowing, music-filled temperament stands behind this noble serenity and tamed passion, which with a superiority beyond compare brings out the utmost in subtlety, as well as in upswing and clarity, from the splendid NWDR Symphony Orchestra.

Who exists today who fine-nervedly brightens and builds up spaciously Reger’s musically ascending, yet so incredibly sensitive, lyrical-intimate music, as it became an event here in the Hiller Variations with their mighty double fugue apotheosis? Almost transformed, as if renewed from its roots, seemed Schumann’s D minor symphony: At last without false emotional smoke and nervous frenzy, but all the more real in the passionately poetic impulse, in the penetrating behaviour of its emotions, whose explosive power became even clearer precisely in this formally rigorous reproduction.

At the beginning Berlioz’s overture to ‘Benvenuto Cellini’: a brilliant firework of orchestral artistry, which ravishingly revealed the other side of Fritz Busch’s universal and cosmopolitan art: Welcome and applause became ovation." - Die Welt, 1951