At the time of his retirement in 2006, Nicholas Busch was one of the few remaining orchestral musicians in London to have played under the conducting legends of the previous century. Son of composer William Busch, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London and made his name as principal horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra, joining the ensemble in 1963 and playing as principal and soloist on Sir John Barbirolli’s famous 1969 recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. 

But it was at the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which he joined as principal horn in 1972, that Busch settled and indeed flourished. He played under LPO principal conductors Bernard Haitink, Sir Georg Solti, Franz Welser-Möst, Kurt Masur and effectively under Vladimir Jurowski, who was principal conductor in all but name during the season Busch retired.

It was with conductor Klaus Tennstedt, though, that Busch enjoyed his most fruitful relationship, the two men sharing a direct, unfussy and unassuming temperament, and a disdain for airs and graces. Tennstedt referred to Busch as ‘my genius’ and reportedly only agreed to conduct Brahms’s Third Symphony with the LPO – a piece he rarely conducted in concert – because ‘no-one can play the slow movement like Mr Busch.’

Not all conductors enjoyed such a positive relationship with their outspoken principal horn, who was one of a faction of LPO musicians who were notoriously critical of Tennstedt’s predecessor at the LPO, Sir Georg Solti. Busch told journalist Danny Danziger in the exposé The Orchestra that Solti was ‘awful…the worst conductor ever.’ The remarks were typical of the horn player, whose explanations and insights were frequently as unfussy, strong and glinting as the sound he produced on his instrument. But he had a tremendous subtlety as a player, too, with a breathtaking ability to fill the Royal Festival Hall with a floating pianissimo. ‘I’d always been told I’d made a nice sound but I just blew the thing really’, he told his LPO colleague and one of his most successful protégés, the horn player Christopher Parkes. 

When Busch retired in 2006, it was to spend more time on his beloved Essex farm – the farm he spoke about so often and on which, perhaps, he found a more unadulterated happiness than that offered by the concert platform. Busch often said that he’d rather have pursued a career in farming than in music, but that he was forced to ‘stick at the horn’ because, at the height of the recording boom, it provided a more secure means of supporting his family. He will be missed and remembered by them, by his LPO colleagues, and by the horn-playing community in which he is considered something of a legend. 

Andrew Mellor