Busch: Piano Trios & Piano Quartet

Busch, Adolf, Eichenauer, Ulrich, Ravinia Trio

CPO 777 528-2

Chamber Music by Adolf Busch We encounter Adolf Busch as a violinist and the leader of the Busch Quartet on record albums and CDs. His recordings of compositions such as Bach’s Partita in D minor, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the string quartets of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Reger, and the piano trios of Brahms and Schubert are legendary. However, Busch not only was the leading German violinist between the two world wars but also a composer who compiled a catalogue of more than a hundred works. The Ravinia Trio now turns to his trios and piano quartet. The difficulties of the violin parts in both tonally beautiful and formally refined piano trios call for a well-versed violinist like Adolf Busch himself, and for the piano part of the much later quartet the pianist had to be just as familiar with classical music and with the more recent music of Reger, Schönberg, and Busoni as the young Rudolf Serkin then was. Busch’s late works, including the quartet, have acquired a greater microstructural logic – such as had long been a matter of course in Arnold Schönberg’s music – though Busch never adopted Schönberg’s atonal musical language.

CD x 2

CPO

12/08/2015

761203752829