Gramophone Insert of Randall Goosby’s Decca Classics debut album

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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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