Goossens
is at long last coming into his own largely courtesy of the
country that treated him like a pariah over a single indiscretion.
ABC have named a concert hall after him. They have also recorded
most of his orchestral music and issued this singly across three
discs and most recently in a box. In 1999 they issued the first
of the present two discs in the perceptive hands of pianist
Antony Gray who also provides the notes which are a labour of
love.
Kaleidoscope
consists of twelve
miniature pictures from childhood. These are imaginative and
light-textured - a series of childhood vignettes. Antony Gray
- who also wrote the booklet notes - gives a performance which
seems to reflect considerable thought in recreating these twelve
little worlds. The music is impressionistic with shades of Scarbo,
Le Gibet and Petrushka but there’s also a dash
or two of Warlock and Moeran along the way. The Four Conceits
are from a similar sketchbook. Later the Conceits were issued
in a version for orchestra and in this form were recorded by
Goossens and his eponymous orchestra on Edison Bell Velvet Face
78s circa 1920. Goossens was obsessed with trains and boats
and planes. The three sketches Ships reflect this but
take a broader and more romantic line than the first two collections.
The Debussy Homage (1937) has a wandering soft focus.
The delicious Folk Tune is richly spun; contrasting with
the spiky Scherzo. Bonzo and Pikki (family
diary pages) are lovingly rendered, recalling Elgar's Mina.
The flighty Capriccio recalls Bax's O Dame Get Up
and Bake Your Cakes. The 1914 Concert Study is a
thorny and slightly heartless fantasy of Graingerian brusqueness.
The Nature Poems (1919) are dedicated to Goossens' friend
Moiseiwitsch. These are easily the most impressive sequence
on CD1: recalling Frank Bridge's piano sonata and Gargoyles.
We are treated to floating veils of sound, a concentrated central
Pastoral and a finale (Bacchanal) which is a joyous
exploration of a highly emotional theme of Baxian shapeliness.
The
second disc collects Goossens pieces from the periphery of his
output. The Bach Andante fits neatly into a genre of
Bach keyboard adaptation much alive in the 1920s and 1930s with
other examples by RVW and Bax included in Bach volumes commissioned
by or associated with Harriet Cohen. Antony Gray is twin-tracked
in Rhythmic Dance which is cheerfully spiky and pummellingly
Slav; its celebratory uproar occasionally recalls Grainger at
one moment and Rachmaninov at another. The diptych Forlane
and Toccata was one of Goossens’ last completed works. The
music has a higher than usual quotient of dissonance though
modest really. It recalls the piano music of Bernard van Dieren
in its dankness. It also seems to relate to the lichen-hung
mood of his own miniature orchestral piece By The Tarn
which was recorded on EMI by Richard Hickox but nicely done
years before on the BBC by Myer Fredman. The titles and style
also proclaim a link with the early music movement. The East
of Suez music was written for a 1922 production of the Somerset
Maugham play. The producer was Basil Dean who several years
later was to produce Flecker’s Hassan - an other exotic subject
- with Delius’s music. The original East of Suez production
starred Basil Rathbone. The theatre orchestra for which it was
written comprised a standard small theatre orchestra plus harp,
piano and percussion. For some reason he never made an orchestral
suite but a five movement piano suite was published. Here we
get the Overture, Incidental music to Scene 1, A street in
Pekin, Prelude to Scene 3 - Buddhist Temple; Prelude
to Scene 4: The Anderson’s House; Prelude to Scene 5:
Courtyard of the Temple. The suite has a distinctly Chinese
accent mixed with infusions of Ravel, clangorous, awed, innately
ominous even threatening, psychologically oppressive. Only in
the overture and final prelude are there flashes of cheery ‘rickshaw’
energy. The language stays clear of shudderingly embarrassing
Ketèlbeyisms and links with comparable works from that era by
Lambert, Bliss and Holbrooke (Piano Concerto The Orient).
There are nineteen numbers in Goossens’ ballet score L’Ecole
en Crinoline. The piece was written in 1921-22 while Goossens
was conducting for the Diaghilev ballet company. Spiced with
wrong-note harmony this score follows a track associated with
Lord Berners and with Stravinsky in some of his two piano music.
The scenario takes a frilly inconsequential tale involving ballerinas,
a dancing school, dreams, a curate, fainting and suchlike. Some
of it reminded me of Bax’s attempt at a Diaghilev ballet: The
Truth About Russian Dancers. Real mastery surfaces from
time to time e.g. with tr. 21 Amelia dashes the dunces’ cap
from her head which sounds, in this context, as incongruously
dark as Bax’s Winter Waters and sections of his Second
Piano Sonata. Much of this score seems to be at triple forte
- a little more differentiation of dynamic might have been welcome
from Goossens ... or is it from Mr Gray. Otherwise Mr Gray is
a highly sympathetic and powerful exponent of this music; certainly
not an apologist.
As
for the competition there is an excellent disc by Jeremy Filsell
on Guild. He also twin-tracks with himself in Rhythmic Dance,
a piece which has been championed by that virtuoso of the pianola,
Michael Broadway. The Forlane and Toccata was recorded
on LP by Michael G Thomas on clavichord. Alan Cuckston, in his
valuable British piano music series, recorded the Nature
Poems on his own label and Eric Parkin broadcast the sequence
for the BBC in 1987. Raphael Terroni recorded a particularly
characterful Kaleidoscope for the BMS in 1981 but that
was only ever issued on cassette. Richard Rodney Bennett recorded
Folk Tune for Polydor circa 1972 and this has since been
reissued by EMI Classics with the rest of the collection including
Lambert’s Piano Concerto.
If
you already have the admirable ABC box which presents much of
Goossens’ work for orchestra on three CDs then you will need
this set as a perfect complement. What we now also need is recordings
of his two string quartets, his two Phantasy Concertos (piano,
1937 and violin, 1959); the Cowboy Fantasy (a relic of
the conductor’s Cincinnati days in the 1940s), his operas Don
Juan de Mañara and Judith as well as his most imposing
work: The Apocalypse. ABC have the latter in their archives
from an LP and cassette issued in the mid-1980s.
Another
required acquisition for British music enthusiasts or anyone
wanting to track the path of imaginative piano music during
the first half of the last century.
Rob Barnett
AVAILABILITY
Buywell
Just Classical
Antony Gray (piano)
