Busch at Work

The concert had all the ingredients of a prosaic, academic affair, but the result was anything but stuffy. Three of Johann Sebastian Bach's six famous Brandenburg concertos were to be played by a small body of musicians (such an orchestra as Bach had in mind), with scrupulous regard for the composer's intentions (as deduced from a study of Bach manuscripts), without a conductor (as it would have been played in Bach's day). After Adolf Busch had put his Chamber Music Players through their paces last week in Manhattan's Town Hall--in their first U.S. concert--listeners were agreed that rarely had Bach's music sounded so fluid, spontaneous, downright enjoyable.

What the audience saw were the externals of the performance. Apple-cheeked Violinist Adolf Busch, acting as concertmaster, nodded his head, lifted his elbow occasionally as he fiddled, but used no baton. Behind this skin-deep sign of novelty lay a sinewy idea: Adolf Busch had chosen to build an orchestra that functioned, not like an orchestra, but like a string quartet.

He had picked the hard way. Orchestral players are kept together, after a few rehearsals, by the conductor's beat; quartet players keep together by the kind of intuition that good bridge partners have, developed through countless hours of playing together. When Violinist Busch formed his Chamber Music Players in Switzerland in 1935, he took his own Busch String Quartet as a nucleus, held 70 rehearsals before the orchestra's debut concert. When he reassembled the group in the U.S. last May (with a few changes in personnel), he persuaded the musicians to rehearse for ten months.

To those who know Adolf Busch, such musicianly zeal was no occasion for surprise. German by birth, Swiss by choice, sturdy, boyish Adolf Busch has long plied his art in the U.S., giving music performances that highlighted the music, not the performances. Busch prefers his music straight, as the composer wrote it, hence scorns transcriptions, distrusts editions, tries to ferret out original manuscripts whenever possible.

CBS announced that it had signed a contract with Manhattan's Philharmonic-Symphony Society, to continue broadcasting the Philharmonic's Sunday afternoon concerts to radio listeners (an estimated 10,000,000 of them) for five more years.

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