Perlman program veteran returns as rising star to Sarasota for chamber concert

Randall Goosby and his siblings were “encouraged” by their mother to study an instrument as a child but they were given a choice about which one they would choose.

When he was 6, Goosby tried piano lessons but decided after just a few months that it was too hard. Before he turned 7, however, “I picked up a violin and from that point on for about two years, I was just always with a violin in my hand. That, to me, was what watching TV or going outside to play was for other kids.”

He started with the Suzuki method and while “it usually takes maybe six months or so for a brand new violinist to move through the first book of music, I got through four books in a year,” he recalled in a telephone interview while searching for a parking spot in New York City. “My mom saw that I have a knack for it and always encouraged me to keep playing.”

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Now 26, Goosby has shown far more than a knack with the violin. The Los Angeles Times said he “plays like an angel with nothing to prove. A cool, calm, collected angel.”

He has become an acclaimed rising star as a guest soloist with orchestras and a chamber concert artist around the country. He returns to Sarasota, where he spent five important winter years studying and performing with the Perlman Music Program/Suncoast, for a special concert with frequent musical collaborator pianist Zhu Wang at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 8 at the Sarasota Opera House.

It’s a prelude to the return of the PMP/Suncoast Winter Residency that begins Dec. 28 after a two-year hiatus because of the COVID pandemic. It will feature about 30 young violinists, ages 12-18, following in Goosby’s footsteps, with Itzhak Perlman and other master musicians leading the students through open rehearsals, private lessons, master classes and even singing. It culminates with a Celebration Concert on Jan. 5 at the Sarasota Opera House.

The concert is part of the organization’s expansion beyond the two-week winter residency, which itself is an extension of the original Perlman program that takes place over seven weeks each summer on Shelter Island in New York.

Goosby said he attended the Sarasota program from 2011 through 2015, starting when he 14. “That was for me the period in my life where I realized, with total clarity, that there’s nothing I’d rather do with my life than play music,” he said. “I was utterly inspired by all the musicians I got to meet and play with or listen to.”

That was years after he made his debut with the Jacksonville Symphony at age 9, an evening he doesn’t really remember.

“When I was that young, people would say I have such poise, such stage presence. I didn’t know that these things were important enough to get nervous for. I was just doing what I always loved to do, which was just play, so wearing fancy clothes and standing and playing didn’t do much to my psyche.”

His concert in Sarasota will feature performances of Deux Morceaux pour Violin et Piano by Lili Boulanger; Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2; Suite for Violin and Piano by William Grant Still and Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9, which he describes as the “warhorse in the chamber violin repertoire.”

He said the program is “varied in terms of styles, the sounds, the textures we program. It’s a really fun adventure for us and the audience.”

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Grant Still is one of a number of Black composers whom Goosby has been bringing attention to in his concerts and his debut recording “Roots,” which was released in 2021 by Decca Records.

“They came to me midway through the pandemic and said we want to sign you and find a really compelling story that’s yours and one that people haven’t heard before. It was just a second and a light bulb went off and man, have I got some stories,” he said.

The album features work by Black composers as well as the Czech Antonin Dvořák and American George Gershwin, who were both heavily influenced by Black folk music and spirituals, Goosby said.

He’s hopeful that in the future concert programmers will get away from a “box-checking mindset. ‘This is a good program, but we don’t have a woman composer.’ ‘Let’s do the same with a Black composer or an Indian composer.’ We need to find ways that these different types of music are connected and whether it is a narrative element or harmonic element that these pieces have in common, there is a lot of common ground that’s shared in all classical music.”

In concert

Violinist Randall Goosby and pianist Zhu Wang perform at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 8 for the perlman Music Program/Suncoast at the Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota. Tickets are $40-$80. 941-328-1300; sarasotaopera.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Rising violin star returns to Sarasota for chamber music concert