‘ALL IT TAKES IS ONE’

American violin virtuoso Randall Goosby may only be in his twenties, but he is already deeply committed to passing on his passion for music to the younger generation, as he tells Amanda Holloway

OLLIE ALI

Even a violin superstar needs a day off now and then. Randall Goosby is calling from the back of a taxi (the seatbelt is a giveaway) and admits that he’s just been playing a round of golf with a friend in upstate New York. Relaxed and refreshed, he’s heading back to his apartment in the city to prepare for a recital at his alma mater, the Juilliard School: the finale of a symposium dedicated to fostering the legacy of the great string teacher Dorothy DeLay. Goosby (now 27) was not one of DeLay’s students; instead he was the protégé of Itzhak Perlman and was recommended to the Juilliard junior programme by Perlman himself. He has just completed an artist diploma with Perlman and Catherine Cho at Juilliard, fitting it around a busy schedule of concerto and chamber performances around the world. Signed to Decca in 2020 at the age of 24, he released his first recording, a recital entitled Roots, in 2021, and his second, of violin concertos by Bruch and Price, in May 2023. You’ll also find him on the soundtrack of Chevalier, the flashy new biopic about 18th-century virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges – sometimes described as the ‘black Mozart’.

But there’s another side to this articulate, engaging young man which sets him apart from other soloists. Born in San Diego, California, to a Korean mother and African American father, Goosby had the chance – through parental support, good teachers and programmes for students with promise – to develop his musical talent. ‘I’ve always had very selfless and considerate teachers behind me and I think that’s a big part of why I am where I am,’ he says. He is determined that other children, particularly from underserved communities, have the same access. He’s not just paying lip service to the idea of outreach but rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in.

In 2018, still just 22, he won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York City and acquired professional artist management. In 2019 he was named the inaugural Robey Artist by the UK’s Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) and its affiliated charity, London Music Masters (LMM). He started mentoring students in schools around the UK. ‘Many of them were students of colour, and I was told by everyone, kids and adults, how meaningful it was to see someone who looks like you doing anything – especially in a field like classical music where there are so few of us. It can’t be overstated how important that is for kids who are starting to get interested and involved in classical music.’

Now, wherever he is performing he looks for opportunities to work in the community. ‘I seek out orchestra-partnered schools or any groups of children that I can casually play for and talk to, for the purpose of giving students what may be their first exposure to live classical music – communities where classical music is not part of people’s way of life, students who don’t have access to regular concerts, to instruments or teachers. I play, tell them a little about my story and establish common ground between myself and the students. I don’t want to do what they call a teabag visit – you drop in, you stay a couple of minutes, then you take it out and throw it away. Ideally, I’d like to create a lasting relationship, whether it’s between myself personally and the students, or just between the orchestra and the institution.’

The Renaissance Quartet: (l–r) Daniel Haas, Randall Goosby, Jeremiah Blacklow and Jameel Martin

DANIEL PERALES

Goosby recently visited Jamaica with the Renaissance Quartet, made up of himself and three good friends: violinist Jeremiah Blacklow, violist Jameel Martin and cellist Daniel Hass. There, the musicians met an inspiring group of students. ‘We were invited to give a benefit concert for the girls’ high school where my girlfriend had been a student,’ he says. ‘She still teaches there and runs a music programme. We went into schools and played Mozart and Beethoven and we’d ask the students simple questions like, “Does this piece make you think of something?” We got such emotionally mature and astute answers, things like, “This is music that wants to be happy and is not.” It served to remind us of why we do this work, how important it is to communicate something effectively and honestly to the students.’ It’s not just the students who benefit, he says. ‘It does a lot for me and my colleagues as performers because it forces us to play in a hyper-descriptive way. It reminds you that even in a big concert hall where most people know every note you’re playing, you need to make an effort to describe the music as clearly and vividly as you can.’

Goosby’s relationship with the violin was kindled by his mother, who, having been brought up in Japan, was not impressed by music provision in America. ‘It’s kind of a toss-up whether you’ll find a music education programme in a school in the US,’ says Goosby. ‘She wanted to be sure that we [Goosby has two younger siblings] had the ability and the option to express ourselves on an instrument.’ Goosby began

Suzuki lessons aged seven, with his mother learning alongside him. ‘Suzuki does a wonderful job of creating a foundation of discipline, and parental involvement makes a huge difference,’ he says. ‘My mum was always in the room when I was practising, almost until I left for college, and now she’s one of my most trusted confidants.’ Goosby rapidly outgrew his Suzuki teacher and his mother found another teacher, Routa Kroumovitch-Gomez, at Stetson University near Daytona Beach, Florida, about an hour and a half’s drive from their home in Jacksonville. Goosby made his debut with the Jacksonville Symphony at the age of nine.

The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and Goosby enrolled with Philippe Quint, the Juilliard-trained Russianborn American soloist who had given him a couple of lessons at a festival in Colorado in 2007. One weekend a month he and his mother flew to New York for lessons, which Goosby admits became a pretty punishing schedule for someone barely in their teens. It produced results, though – in 2010 he became the youngest-ever winner (aged 13) at the junior competition of the Sphinx Organization (founded to support young black and Latinx string players), and performed at a Young People’s Concert at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic.

Quint encouraged him to apply for the Perlman Music Program, the seven-week intensive summer music school founded by Perlman’s wife Toby on Shelter Island, New York. After impressing the maestro, Goosby was one of the rare students to be invited to study with Perlman year-round at his Manhattan home, travelling regularly from Memphis, where he was still at high school. He joined the Juilliard junior programme and went on to a complete a degree there studying with Perlman and Cho. ‘I studied with them through all four years of undergraduate studies. I switched to different teachers for my master’s degree [Donald Weilerstein and Laurie Smukler], but Ms Cho is always that voice in the back of my head,’ he says.

Goosby (second left) with Itzhak Perlman (centre) and (l–r) cellist Sterling Elliott, violist Ao Peng and pianist Sahun Hong in 2019

Goosby at his graduation from the Juilliard School in 2018

Has he been able to translate the advice of these great teachers into lessons for his own students? ‘I try to keep hold of a very simple concept that Mr Perlman presented to me in one of my very first lessons on the programme, when I was 14. I was playing something quite challenging and was asking questions like, “How do I make this first shift sound cleaner? How do I make this bow stroke a little more solid?” And at a certain point in the lesson he put the music down and asked me, “What do you think about this music? How does it make you feel?” And I said, “Wow, I don’t know that I’ve thought about it.” And his response was, “Well, if you don’t have any particular thoughts or feelings about the piece, what’s the point of the technique? If you don’t have a message, you don’t have a story, an image that you’re trying to convey, then the technique is meaningless. It’s there to serve the music, not the other way round.’

Goosby thinks he’s lucky to have had a relatively normal childhood, rather than being treated like a prodigy. ‘While my mother insisted I had to do my three hours of practice, my dad encouraged me to go outside and play with friends as soon as practice was over.’ Now he’s found a way to combine work and social life – his regular recital pianist is a friend, Zhu Wang, and in 2021 he and his three friends formed the Renaissance Quartet. ‘We grew up together on the Perlman programme. We’ve known each other for over a decade, and whether we’re performing or not, whenever we’re in the city we always just get together and make music. If it weren’t for all the great friends I’ve made and great collaborators that I’ve met, I don’t know if I’d still be playing music,’ he says. ‘It is that sort of connection and empathy that’s required from playing with others that keeps me coming back.’

Goosby in 2010

PERLMAN AND JUILLIARD PHOTOS COURTESY OF RANDALL GOOSBY. YOUNG PHOTO COURTESY SPHINX ORGANIZATION

‘I NEVER THOUGHT OF MYSELF AS A WUNDERKIND. I DIDN’T REALLY FEEL AS IF THERE WAS ANYTHING SPECIAL OR DIFFERENT ABOUT MY SKILLS.’

He says he didn’t have to make an awkward transition mentally from prodigy to great concert artist. ‘I never thought of myself as a wunderkind. I didn’t really feel as if there was anything special or different about my skills. I was always able to look around and find something in someone else’s playing that really inspired or motivated me.’ Career-wise, though, the transition to sought-after soloist happened very quickly. ‘Before the pandemic, for example, I was still a master’s student, and I had just won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. This was 2018 and I had some smaller recitals in towns around the country. I was just beginning to hit the road and start performing, but I wouldn’t have called it a career. And suddenly after the pandemic I had commercial representation and management and a full schedule for the next two years. It was a bit shocking!’ Through YCAT Goosby was given a residency by LMM and named the inaugural Robey Artist. While he mentored

children from diverse backgrounds, he saw how LMM teaching partners were restoring composers and performers of colour to music history. When he signed with Decca, the repertoire choices on his first album made a bold statement of intent. Roots features composers such as Still, Price and Perkinson, as well as those inspired by African American culture, notably Gershwin and Dvořák. At the time, he described it as ‘giving voice and paying respect to some of these artists and composers’ without whom ‘I probably wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing today’.

It’s become part of the Goosby story – the brilliant young violinist championing composers and performers of colour. But he was brought up playing the classical canon, and his heroes also include David Oistrakh, Heifetz and, of course, Perlman. ‘I think the black composers aspect of my programming has certainly blown up in the past few years,’ he says. ‘In classical music, especially here in the States, that’s become very important to the fabric of programming. But for me it’s not that sort of public-facing, performative, box-checking thing that it is for a lot of big institutions and orchestras. It’s part of my story, not only something that I feel is important to me but also something that I’m able to communicate very effectively – and it’s something I relate to in a different way from how I do to, say, Mozart or Beethoven. That’s refreshing, not only for me but for audiences as well.’

Goosby is using a residency at the Southbank Centre in London in the 2023–24 season to look more widely at the black experience rather than just featuring African American composers. A recital at the Purcell Room in October sees him and Wang juxtaposing music by Price, Coleridge-Taylor and Still and works by Dvořák and Strauss. In January 2024, Wang again joins Goosby, this time also with violist and narrator Jameel Martin and cellist Eddie Pogossian for a programme titled Intersections – Black Music and Words. This concert offers a chance to experience a rarely heard set of songs by Previn (in collaboration with novelist Toni Morrison) in an instrumental version in which, Goosby says, he’ll have to sound like a ‘beautiful, almost pained soprano on the violin’. This is heard alongside music by Coleridge- Taylor and Perkinson.

In future recitals, Goosby plans to draw on the connection between Coleridge- Taylor and Brahms, who were working roughly in the same period, as well as the connection between Strauss, Price and the former’s Sonata. ‘I hear a lot of Straussian influence in Price’s music, whether it be the concertos or the fantasies I had the chance to record, which is harmonically adventurous music. At the same time, I’m highlighting the differences in the experiences of those two composers.’

MAIN PHOTO OLLIE ALI. FAMILY PHOTO COURTESY RANDALL GOOSBY

Goosby (centre) with his family

‘THE BLACK COMPOSERS ASPECT OF MY PROGRAMMING IS PART OF MY STORY... SOMETHING THAT I’M ABLE TO COMMUNICATE VERY EFFECTIVELY’

His concerto engagements in 2023–4 feature Romantic giants from Bruch to Brahms, but he’s excited also to be playing the Korngold Violin Concerto, ‘one of my absolute favourites’, in the autumn, and some Price later in the season. When we talk, Goosby is about to make his debut in South Korea and Japan, his mother’s birthplace. ‘She is a hundred per cent Korean but she was born and raised in Osaka, so culturally she is essentially Japanese.’ He has talked about researching these different heritages in terms of their music in the same way as he has sought out African American composers.

‘Obviously, that music is as much a part of me as black music is. But I’ve had a lot more exposure to and experience with music by black composers and black popular music than I have with music from my mother’s part of the world. It will be a fun and inspiring challenge to figure out how to weave that music into my life, not just my programming, in a really honest and meaningful way.

Goosby with conductor Yannick Nézet- Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra

CONCERTO PHOTO PETE CHECCHIA. PORTRAIT PHOTO OLLIE ALI. STRAD PHOTO COURTESY OF BEIN & FUSHI INC. MATTHEW TOLZMANN, PHOTOGRAPHER

‘I’m incredibly grateful for the platform that I’ve been given over the past few years and I hope I will be able to maintain it going forward. Not everyone can be passionate about everything; not everyone can be hell-bent on exposing people to new music, to music that should have been heard a long time ago. All it takes is one person.’ Things are changing as a new generation brings their ideas and attitudes to the classical music world. ‘I look around at my colleagues and we all have a similar outlook on what’s important for the future, in terms of shifting the culture a bit. I’m grateful to be surrounded by that myself, but for the benefit of the rest of the world and for much of our audience, I take very serious responsibility for being an advocate in this way.’ Providing exposure and access to all students who don’t have music is a serious mission for a young man, but Goosby knows how to keep a work–life balance: ‘Golf will persist throughout!’ he declares.

GOOSBY ON GETTING TO KNOW A STRAD

‘I’ve been playing the Cremonese ‘Strauss’ Stradivari of 1708, on loan from the Samsung Foundation of Culture, Korea, since January so we’re still getting to know each other! A luthier once told me that whatever it is that you’re trying to do physically, whether it be left-hand or right-hand technique, a great violin is like an amplifier for all of those nuances and details. I didn’t really understand that fully until I started playing the Strad. The slightest little deviation in the left-hand frame or the angle of the bow, the angle of the fingers of the left hand when you put them down, can have the biggest effect on the sound. It’s very comforting and inspiring to know just how many possibilities exist in an instrument of this calibre.

‘I’ve been searching for a great bow for about a year now and I think I’ve tried just about every 19th-century French bow maker, but I’m still trying to find the right fit.’