Amadeus Quartett LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Streichquartette Op. 95 - 127 - 130 - 131 - 132 - 133 - 135

London was the perfect place from which to set out on their career. Much of Europe had been under the control of the Third Reich during the war and countless cities severely bombed. In Britain, despite the horrors and privations of war, many felt that now was the time to build on the civilized values for which “we” had fought. Covent Garden reopened to opera and ballet, the Arts Council was established to provide public funds for music and the arts, and the BBC established the Third Programme, a radio network devoted to high-quality music and culture. In spring 1951 the Festival of Britain opened on the south bank of the River Thames and ran throughout the summer – the festival site was then demolished, except for its proud centrepiece, the Royal Festival Hall. Audiences to classical music were everywhere boosted by members of the émigré community eager to recapture something of the cultural life they had been forced to flee. Meanwhile, many leading recording companies (soon to replace old-fashioned gramophone records with the latest “LPs”) were setting up in London, where the city’s orchestral musicians were thought to be the world’s best sight-readers. One way and another, London was becoming the centre of the musical world. Literally so: former musical capitals such as Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague or Budapest, struggling to shake off the debris of war, found themselves on the frontiers of the emerging Cold War, while the introduction of the jet plane soon enabled London to be reached from New York in a mere seven hours.

Within a couple of years of its debut the Amadeus Quartet was getting regular engagements in Britain and abroad, and by the time of its tenth anniversary it was in the midst of an eight-month world tour that took it right across the USA and on to Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Like a number of refugees from Nazism, the members of the Amadeus were keen to help rebuild the nations from which they had fled, and they frequently performed in Germany and Austria. Their principal recording company for much of their career was Deutsche Grammophon, and their repertoire consisted primarily of the great Austro-German classics by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. Discerning listeners claimed to find a “Viennese” quality in the Amadeus sound, perhaps arising from the broad vibrato sometimes adopted, or the warm sense of rubato that enabled the foursome, as with a single voice, to effect subtle variations of tempo the way a singer might do in a Schubert song.