Randall Goosby: Roots

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Xavier Dubois Foley

Genre:

Chamber

Label: Decca

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 75

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 485 1664

485 1664. Randall Goosby: Roots

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Shelter Island Xavier Dubois Foley, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Xavier Dubois Foley, Composer
Blue / s Forms Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Porgy and Bess, Movement: Summertime George Gershwin, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Porgy and Bess, Movement: A woman is a sometime thing George Gershwin, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Porgy and Bess, Movement: It ain't necessarily so George Gershwin, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Porgy and Bess, Movement: Bess, you is my woman now George Gershwin, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Suite for Violin and Piano William Grant Still, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Adoration Florence Bea(trice) Price, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Fantasie No 1 Florence Bea(trice) Price, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Fantasie No 2 Florence Bea(trice) Price, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Deep River Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano
Sonatina for Violin and Piano Antonín Dvořák, Composer
Randall Goosby, Violin
Zhu Wang, Piano

Revisiting my notes on this first recording by the American violinist Randall Goosby, I find that the word I’ve scribbled down most frequently is ‘unaffected’. Faint praise? Not by any means. To hear why, dive straight in with Dvořák’s Sonatina (and who couldn’t warm to a young artist who builds their debut disc around this most unostentatious of works?). Listen to the directness and controlled energy with which Goosby and the pianist Zhu Wang launch themselves at Dvořák’s melodies: the playful kick they give to his rhythms and the glow of their collective tone.

There’s not a trace of grandstanding, or exaggeration for easy effect. This is selfless, stylish playing which – paradoxically – ends up by projecting the personalities of both artists with even more freshness and warmth. So elsewhere on the disc, Heifetz’s arrangements of Gershwin songs come across as second cousin to Ravel; while William Grant Still’s Suite and Florence Price’s arresting, rhapsodic Fantasies (these are premiere recordings, and it would have been good to have learnt more about them from the booklet) have an expressive urgency that is all the more potent for feeling so unforced.

Make no mistake, Goosby is a virtuoso: he can sing, full-throated, and shape fluid, gleaming phrases high on the E string with the best of them. But it never sounds knowing or contrived: more like an artist speaking eloquently in his own voice, with lucid, sympathetic partnership from Wang. The bassist-composer Xavier Dubois Foley (also, clearly, a compelling performer) plays with Goosby on his own bluegrass-flavoured Shelter Island: a striking and wholly appropriate way to launch one of the more intelligent – and engaging – debut discs I’ve heard in recent years.

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