CD

The Busch Quartet, Beethoven: The Late String Quartets (EMI Classics, three CDs). If you read my recent Wall Street Journal column about Adolf Busch and the Nazis and want to hear how this courageous artist made music, the place to start is EMI’s collection of the Busch Quartet’s legendary 78-era recordings of Beethoven’s last six string quartets, which is available on CD or as a digital download. The playing may strike contemporary listeners as less than ideally polished, but the interpretations are uniquely penetrating, and Busch’s violin playing combines forthrightness and Innigkeit in a way that no one has rivaled, before or since. Warning: don’t expect state-of-the-art sound (TT).