Randall Goosby receives rave review for NYC recital debut
Randall Goosby with pianist Zhu Wang performed his NYC recital debut at the 92nd Street Y on December 9, 2021
A Rising Star's Enchanting NY Recital Debut
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
Musical America
December 13, 2021
If all Randall Goosby had going for him was his sound, he would go far. With a signature tone of simmering heat, polish, and power, this 25-year-old violinist could have been destined to take on leading roles in the major concert halls of the world. No wonder promoters seize every opportunity to mention Itzhak Perlman, a champion and mentor since Goosby was in his teens.
But with his recital at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Hall on December 9, Goosby showed that he’s preparing for a different leadership role – one in which he might use his dazzling musicianship and seductive tone to both illuminate and question the repertory. In the outstanding pianist Zhu Wang he has a valuable ally: their interplay in works by W. A. Mozart, Florence Price, and César Franck was by turns spirited, tender, and unyieldingly urgent.
Goosby, the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father, is no stranger to the limelight. At 13 he became the youngest winner of the Sphinx Concerto Competition, which led to national engagements in concert halls as well as in classrooms, where he developed a passion for outreach work with underserved communities. In 2018 he was chosen to join the Young Concert Artists roster, (Zhu did the same, in 2020), and in July he was awarded a Sphinx Medal for Excellence. For Roots, his debut album for Decca this year, Goosby assembled a beguiling program exploring the interchange of African-American and European musical traditions. By presenting works of Black composers such as Price, William Grant Still, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor alongside music by Dvorák and Gershwin, he revealed a complex web of influence and debt.
Florence Price, centerstage
Three works by Price that are featured on that album formed the emotional heart of this recital. Her Fantasy No. 1 in G minor opens with a solo bravura flourish across the entire range of the violin before snapping into an impetuous, rhythmic dance. Goosby played it with full-blooded sound and seething energy, nimbly following the music’s mercurial changes in momentum and mood. In the Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp Minor, where the influence of church spirituals is more overt, his sound took on a vocal quality, melting and heavy-hearted, but quick to brighten on sudden rhapsodic outbursts. Zhu brought a voluptuous roundness to the powerful piano chords which, bell-like, seemed to egg on the violinist toward the stormy finish.
Another work by Price, “Adoration,” adapted from a solo organ work, is a deceptively simple hymn that requires self-effacing lyricism from a performer. Goosby rendered the calmly ecstatic lines with a bow hand so subtle that the individual bow strokes seemed to fuse into a single breath.
Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 32 in B-flat (K.454), which opened the program, introduced Goosby as an attentive chamber music partner – not self-effacing, for sure, but unselfish and responsive to the music's conversational give-and-take. His tone here was lean and flexible, allowing room for Zhu’s chiseled but full-bodied articulation to shine through. In the fast outer movements their playing was genial and debonair as befits Mozart at his most unsentimentally straight-forward.
But they also brought out all the mystery of the Andante, a movement in which a guileless melody seems to stumble toward doubt and growing self-awareness. The two musicians gently deepened the poignancy by allowing a bit of space to hover over the recurring motif that sounds like a question, and by bringing a drop of bitterness to their sound in the minor section.
And on to the Franck
The program ended with Franck’s Violin Sonata in A, which became a vehicle for full-throated and insistent drama. One might have wished for a more diffuse violin sound in the opening movement to capture the languor of the calm before the storm. But the consistently clean focus of Goosby’s sound is also what makes it project every nuance so effortlessly that every phrase seems to be half a step away from speaking.
Goosby and Zhu build expression as much through fluctuations in time as in sound. In the second movement, for instance, Franck builds in a temporary lull with a section where the tempo slows to a falter. This can sometimes lead to the tension draining out of the story, but as Goosby and Zhu played it, it seemed as if, with their momentum unbroken, they had merely entered a space subject to different gravity. The sonata ended with searing intensity, Goosby’s sound now unapologetically ardent and muscular.
As an encore, the musicians offered a rendition of Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (arranged by Jascha Heifetz) that brimmed with joyously confident swagger. Here was a young artist with technical chops and the charisma to match, who seemed fully aware of his powers – and poised to use them for good.
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