Beethoven Violin Concerto – Adolf Busch

Somewhere between the studio and the concert hall lies a category of performance that recordings almost never capture: the broadcast, that strange hybrid where a performer plays as if for an audience he cannot quite see, into microphones he has learned to forget. This newly issued Copenhagen tape of Adolf Busch playing the Beethoven concerto belongs to that category, and it tells us things about Busch that the more familiar 1942 New York studio recording, made with his brother Fritz on the podium, does not.

Busch by 1949 was not the violinist he had been. The tone had thinned in places, the bow arm occasionally betrayed a slight unsteadiness above the stave. None of this matters much once the reading gets moving, though, because what remains is a musical intelligence incapable of routine. Every phrase in the first movement has been thought through, weighed, and then somehow made to sound spontaneous anyway. That paradox was always Busch’s signature.

Launy Grøndahl and the Danish State Radio orchestra give him sympathetic, unglamorous support. This is not an orchestra of Berlin Philharmonic polish, and the string tone occasionally sounds thin through the radio-transmission murk, all crackle and swallowed overtones. But Grøndahl paces the first-movement exposition with an unforced nobility, and he understands, as too few conductors do even now, that the famous timpani strokes which open the work need to sound like a question, not a gunshot.

Busch’s own cadenza, the one he habitually used rather than Kreisler’s or Joachim’s, deserves particular note. It is contrapuntally alert, faintly severe, entirely free of virtuosic display for its own sake. You can hear in it the fingerprints of a violinist who was also a serious composer, who studied with Max Bruch’s circle in Bonn and thought melodic material worth developing, not merely decorating. Where Heifetz’s cadenza, on his 1955 Reiner recording, dazzles, Busch’s argues.

The slow movement is where this performance distinguishes itself. Busch takes the Larghetto more spaciously than most of his contemporaries dared, slower, if memory serves, than his own 1942 New York account, and the effect is devotional without tipping into sentimentality. There’s a moment about four minutes in where the orchestra falls away to almost nothing and Busch’s line simply floats, unaccompanied in all but a technical sense. The microphones, mercifully, catch the faint hiss of bow on string, the breath before a phrase. Radio engineering of 1949 could be brutal to string tone. Here, oddly, it flatters.

The finale wants more rhythmic snap than Grøndahl quite supplies; the rondo theme could use sharper articulation from the lower strings. But Busch himself dances through it, light-footed, almost puckish, a reminder that he came up in the tradition of Joachim’s pupils, who regarded Beethoven’s finale as good humor rather than heroics.

As for the two Romances, recorded seven years earlier with Alfred Wallenstein and the WOR radio orchestra in Newark: these are lagniappe, but valuable lagniappe. The G major has an unforced sweetness. The F major is songful in a way that recalls Busch’s close friendship and duo partnership with Rudolf Serkin, whose sensibility as an accompanist clearly rubbed off. Wallenstein’s radio band plays with more polish than Grøndahl’s, unsurprisingly, given Newark’s studio conditions versus Copenhagen’s live-broadcast exigencies.

Where does this leave the recording in the Busch discography, already reasonably well populated thanks to Tully Potter’s exhaustive documentary work? Not a first choice for anyone encountering the concerto for the first time. Sonics are boxy, the strings occasionally distort at climaxes, and Grøndahl is a decent director rather than an inspired one. But for anyone who already loves Busch’s 1942 album, or who cares at all about the interpretive tradition running from Joachim through Busch to, say, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, this Copenhagen broadcast is indispensable. Not a supplement so much as a corrective, a reminder that this violinist never gave the same performance twice. Get it for the Larghetto alone.