BUSCH Beethoven in the USA (1919-1950) - PASC618

Fritz Busch was not was the public frequently calls a ‘recording artist’; the number of his studio recordings is strongly limited, and mostly he worked with recording companies long defunct. The current collection of all of Fritz Busch’s Beethoven recordings made in the United States of America contains but one studio recording, which was not published during Busch’s lifetime – the Violin Concerto recorded at the New York Liederkranz Hall one day after the two public concerts at the Carnegie Hall the previous days. Adolf Busch, the conductor’s brother and soloist of all three performances, disallowed a release due to the problematic balance between soloist and orchestra (and although his problem could not be bettered the overall result has been improved by Andrew Rose), which has however been frequently circulated since – in contrast to the live performance, which was released for the first time only in 2006, by Music & Arts. The Beethoven Concerto is one of the few occasions when we can hear the brothers performing together.

Busch had already been performing in New York from 1927; his last New York concert is here represented by a performance of the Fifth Symphony, which in the last movement is marred by some loss of several bars, which have here for the first time been re-inserted from another New York performance, from February 1950, under Bruno Walter. Busch’s only surviving Beethoven recording from the West coast is the Overture to Egmont, performed in three subscription concerts in Los Angeles in 1946, part of which was broadcast in the Standard Oil Radio Hour programme. (The complete New York and Los Angeles concerts recordings have been published by Guild Historical.)

Busch had bought a small house in Riverdale, New York, early in 1948, when he frequently conducted the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and was music director of the Metropolitan Opera. While he appeared in several North American metropoles such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland or Boston only with the Metropolitan touring company, he was several times a guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1947 to 1950. The 1949 broadcast performance of Beethoven’s First Symphony, following a concert performance the previous evening and hitherto misdated in any publications, has suffered only limited circulation, here finding its proper place in Fritz Busch’s discography for the first time.

The bonus file in this collection is one of a total of nine surviving 78s sides recorded by Busch and the Orchester des Württembergischen Landes-Theaters probably in mid-1919. Busch had attained the position as music director in Stuttgart in 1918, as successor of Max von Schillings. The music recorded was largely by Mozart (five sides), Reger (three sides, extracts from the Mozart Variations), and the Beethoven scherzo. Another recording of the Beethoven (now the complete ‘Eroica’) was only to take place in 1950, when Busch went into the Remington recording studio in Vienna for some Beethoven, Haydn, and Brahms (for the Brahms cf. PASC570).

Jürgen Schaarwächter

BuschBrothersArchive in the Max-Reger-Institut, Karlsruhe