My colleague David Cairns and I have a slight disagreement. He thinks the greatest recording of anything ever made by anyone is Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet played by Reginald Kell and the Busch Quartet. I think it is Beethoven’s C sharp minor String Quartet, Op 131 played by the Busch Quartet. What is it about this legendary string ensemble that makes them so special? And why do they not feature at the top of all those ‘50 Greatest…’ lists? The key to the first question is the uncompromising personality of their leader, Adolf Busch. And the second? Perhaps too many people still mistakenly think chamber music is not for them.

The Wiener Konzertvereins-Quartett came together in Vienna at the end of 1912, and after intensive rehearsals – even during Busch’s honeymoon – were first heard on May 25, 1913, playing Haydn at a private concert in Eisenstadt. Their sensational official debut came on August 3 at the Salzburg Festival organised by soprano Lilli Lehmann, with Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartet in F, Op 59 No 1, and Schumann’s String Quartet in A minor, Op 41 No 1: critics compared them with the Joachim Quartet. Their career was in full flood when the Great War came, making it difficult to keep a regular ensemble going. After a slight hiatus when Busch moved to Berlin, in 1919 they were reconstituted as the Busch Quartet with the original cellist, Paul Grümmer. By the end of 1920, Busch’s Swedish pupil Gösta Andreasson was installed as second violinist and the founding viola player, Karl Doktor, had returned from army service. Busch, Andreasson, Doktor and Grümmer made acoustic records for DG in 1922 and played for Eleonora Duse, Maxim Gorky, Arturo Toscanini and Albert Einstein.

Through the 1920s the Busch Quartet were rated the best in Germany and Austria: music societies could sell out a subscription season by including them. Playing some modern music, notably Reger, but mostly classics, the group toured all over Europe – they were hugely popular in Italy. In 1930, Busch’s younger brother Hermann took over the cello chair, in time for the first British tour. Especially after their courageous repudiation of Hitler’s Germany in 1933, the Busch players were constantly heard in London. Their recitals, organised by the Busch Concerts Society, were haunted by intellectuals: Samuel Beckett, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Victor Gollancz, Michael Tippett…Busch’s young sonata partner Rudolf Serkin, described by one London critic as ‘the perfect fifth’, often joined them.

From September 1932, Fred Gaisberg of HMV recorded them at Abbey Road, and although he typecast them too rigidly, immortal performances resulted: seven Beethoven quartets, two by Schubert and Brahms’s C minor, as well as Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet with Kell and the A major Piano Quartet and F minor Quintet with Serkin. Gaisberg wanted a whole Beethoven cycle, including the viola quintets, and Schubert’s C major Quintet, but the war intervened. The quartet emigrated to New York, making discs for Columbia before the 1942 union ban on recording: three more Beethovens, beautiful versions of Mozart’s K428, Dvořák’s Op 51 and Schumann’s Quintet with Serkin. The Busch Quartet did not prosper in America and after the war were no longer the force they had been, although some penetrative records were made. Their first post-war German tour in 1951 was well received but ill health forced the leader’s retirement and he died in 1952.

Only the Busch ensemble, in my experience, have presented the Beethoven quartets on record in their full majesty – and daring. Among the qualities that made Adolf Busch a great violinist were his uniquely long bow strokes, controlled with profound intensity and invested with a strong spiritual charge. Believing that the late quartets had to be taken to extremes, he played fast movements very fast – often up to Beethoven’s controversial markings – and slow movements very slowly. With a rhythmic sense as rigorous in broad tempi as it was exhilarating in quick tempi, he inspired his colleagues to match him in exceptional feats of concentration. Acting as his own producer, with a trusted HMV engineer such as ‘Chick’ Fowler, he generally made just one take of each side in a slow movement, so as to keep the intensity going from take to take. The luminous beauty of the Busch Quartet’s playing can snatch your breath away in any of their repertoire, but the uninitiated should start with late Beethoven. The most recent EMI box even includes Op 130 from New York, plus a sizzling Op 95. Individual Dutton discs supply all the Busch Beethovens except Op 59 No 2.

Key recording

Beethoven 'The Late String Quartets' 

(Warner Classics)