GOOSSENS, SIR EUGÈNE AYNSLEY: Four Sketches Op. 5 Book II
Sir Eugène Aynsley Goossens was born into a family of musicians in London 1893. He was sent to boarding school in Bruges when he was eight and began his musical education at the conservatory there at the age of ten. After gaining the Liverpool Scholarship, Goossens returned to England to study composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood at the Royal College of Music in 1907. He made his conducting debut in April 1912 at an RCM public concert with his first composition, Variations on a Chinese Theme.
In 1921 Goossens formed his own orchestra for a series of contemporary performances. One of these concerts was the British premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, performed in the presence of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Massine. Diaghilev responded by engaging Goossens to conduct the Ballet Russes. From 1923 to 1931, Goossens went to USA at the invitation of the ‘Kodak King’, George Eastman, to conduct his newly founded Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. By the end of the decade Goossens was established as a brilliant and dynamic figure on the podium of America’s greatest orchestras and in 1931 to 1946 was appointed musical director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
From 1947 to 1956, Goossens worked with the Sydney Symphony in Australia and raised them to international fame. He also became director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music and was credited for much of the lobbying to the NSW Government to build a music performance venue which led to the construction of the Sydney Opera House. In 1955 Goossens was knighted for his services to Australian music and was commemorated with the Eugene Goossens Hall, a small concert and recording facility that is part of the broadcasting complex of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Harris Street, Ultimo, in Sydney.
Unfortunately Goossens was forced to resign in March 1956 after a major public scandal involving himself and the so-called Witch of Kings Cross, Rosaleen Norton. Norton was known as an artist of the grotesque and her interest in the occult and erotica, which Goossens secretly shared. Goossens suffered from long periods of illness following the scandal and returned to England in disgrace. He left sketches for a ballet and third opera unfinished at the time of his death in 1962.
Goossens’s success as a conductor, and especially his role in bringing modern and difficult works before a wide public, proved detrimental to his own later career as a composer. His early chamber works were influenced by Debussy and Ravel and his later orchestral compositions, although masterly in their use of instrumental colour, tend to lack an individual voice. This recording showcases the Romance that is gorgeously trilled and sung with a foot in both English and French camps and the Humoresque which has the three players cackling like cherry witches from Goossens’ Four Sketches Op. 5 Book II written in 1913.