Mr. Goossens's Oboe

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 10

Mr. Goossens's Oboe

HE description of the oboe as "an ill wind that no one blows good" most certainly does not apply when the player behind the instrument is Leon’ Goossens. Yet the group of short pieces with piano accompaniment broadcast from Auckland were hardly the warmest of introductions to Mr. Goossens’s playing in New Zealand. The piano is not altogether sympathetic to the oboe and the mild percussiveness of some of these accompaniments tended to puncture the smoothness of the oboe phrases. Leon Goossens’s vibrato, too, which in the concert hall is absorbed into the acoustics of the room, was picked up ruthlessly by the microphone in the slower -of these pieces. Nor does this coldblooded instrument-the microphone, not the oboe-project Goossens’s personality which comes over the platform as genially as his playing. This playing came off best when the oboist joined with the Ruth Pearl String Trio in the Benjamin Britten "Fantasy Quartet." The strings had already presented a cheerful little Schubert Trio. In this and in the Britten as a foil to the oboe, they were admirable. The Britten work at first hearing sounds a rather odd, angular piece of music, but it certainly showed off the oboe. A few nights later from Wellington, however, with a quartet by Stamitz, Leon Goossens must have firmly established himself in the affections of listeners as that incomparable player whose music has been described as "one of the supreme pleasures of the present-day world of music."

O.

J.