Adolf practises the whole day long’, Hedwig reported to Otto and Hanna Grüters from Riehen in September 1949. Busch began the season with a Bach evening in Zurich on the 25th: the two solo Concertos and the Double Concerto with Straumann and a reduced Tonhalle Orchestra. Then on the 28th he flew into West Berlin for a performance of the Beethoven Concerto with the Philharmonic under its young Romanian chief conductor Sergiu Celibidache, at its temporary home, the Titania-Palast. The airlift was still going on – although the Russians and their former Allies were reaching agreement and the last relief plane would fly to the beleaguered city on 6 October – and it was a grim experience to make music in a city unwillingly divided against itself. Busch appeared unaffected at his press conference, of which Rudolf Bauer reported: ‘Broad-shouldered the 58-year-old sits at the table; during the conversation warm good humour shines out of the blue eyes in the massive Westphalian face’. But Bauer, who went to the performance on the 29th, noticed that Busch seemed stirred by ‘deep and painful emotions’ during the orchestral introduction of the Beethoven, after the welcome given him by the audience:

Another critic reported from Busch's recital with Klaus Billing at the same venue that the violinist was at his best in pieces where he was ‘free of all technical inhibitions’:6 Reger's Aria from Op. 103, the Sarabande of Bach's D minor Partita and an encore, the Gavotte en Rondeau from the E major Partita.