Sir Eugene Goossens conducting
Dutton CDBP 9779, 73:04 (Distrib. Harmonia mundi) ****:
Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) made his first impression upon me anonymously, leading a delightful Camden RCA transfer of Tchaikovsky’s Little Russian Symphony with the Cincinnati Symphony under a pseudonym, “Cromwell Symphony.” Goossens, both as composer and conductor, represented a family devoted to music; and he earned a knighthood for his services to Australian music-making, despite a scandal that resulted in his ignominious return to Britain to finish out his days in the service of modern scores by Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Ginastera, and Antheil.
Goossens met composer Arnold Bax in 1916 and led an all-Bax concert in 1922. We begin this excellent compilation with May 1928 transfers of Tintagel (1919) and Mediterranean (1922), the former of which testifies to the composer’s love for pianist Harriet Cohen, here conceived as a conceit to Tristan und Isolde. Wagner and Debussy seem to have influenced Bax greatly, and Mediterranean cannot avoid washes from La Mer. The Second Symphony (1926) by Bax had its American premier in 1930 under Koussevitzky. A turbulent and powerfully emotional, chromatic work, it quotes at several points Bax’s suppressed elegy to Padraic Pearse, an Irish patriot killed in the 1916 Easter uprisings celebrated in the Yeats poem, “Easter 1916.” The BBC performance (2 November 1956) blazes with a tragic, fierce intensity. Bax noted, “I was going through Hell when I rote it.”
John Anthill’s ballet Corroboree (1946), is an Aboriginal dance-ceremony that
celebrates–via a series of totemic dances–the inter-dependence of animals and Man. This inscription (5 December 1950) shimmers with primitive energies we associate with Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos. A vivid Rain Dance might remind some film buff of Green Mansions. The elegance of line and manic authority in the percussion parts reminds me that the CD medium still owes us Goossens’ inscriptions from the ABC Sydney Symphony of Mendelssohn’s Third and the Beethoven Second.
The concert ends with the earliest inscription (31 August 1922) of Goossens’ own setting of Robert Burns’s poem Tam O’Shanter. While Malcolm Arnold may have trumped this piece with imaginative vision, the Goossens had credence for audiences at the Diaghilev Ballet. Even the rousing, martial gait of the piece, its woodwind and horn riffs, cannot counter the hollowness of acoustic timbre, which no amount of engineering alleviates. But the fact that a virtuoso conductor leads a work of color and character remains irrepressible.
— Gary Lemco
