BUSCH The Hamburg Concert, 1951

"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