This song was written in a war zone on Australia's doorstep
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Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
This song was written in a war zone on Australia's doorstep
Forgotten pianist Isador Goodman's New Guinea Fantasy has never been performed in concert. Simon Tedeschi is bringing it back to life.
The Age
6 days ago
- The Age
This song was written in a war zone on Australia's doorstep
Forgotten pianist Isador Goodman's New Guinea Fantasy has never been performed in concert. Simon Tedeschi is bringing it back to life.
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
This song was written in a war zone on Australia's doorstep. Now is your first chance to hear it live
More than 80 years after it was written under the flickering light of a kerosene lamp in the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea, one of Australia's most extraordinary wartime compositions will finally be performed in public. Isador Goodman's New Guinea Fantasy, a lush piece for piano and orchestra shot through with Hollywood grandeur and echoes of Gershwin, Grieg and Rachmaninov, will be performed by pianist Simon Tedeschi as part of a concert at the Australian War Memorial later this month. For Tedeschi, it's not just a milestone musical event, but also a long-overdue tribute to a figure he believes should stand alongside the great pianists of the 20th century, but who has mostly slipped from the collective memory. 'I first heard it when I was 15 or 16,' says Tedeschi. 'I hadn't heard anything quite like it before. I immediately recognised something of an Australia that existed before I was born. I heard the name Isador Goodman, and then I mentioned it to my teacher who said, 'Oh, he was one of the best pianists in the world in the 1950s'. I was like, 'Wow. Who is this guy?'' Goodman, once a household name, has largely been forgotten since his death in 1982. At the height of his fame in the middle of the last century, he was known as the nation's leading concert pianist. He was equally at home playing the popular music of the day, happily pivoting from Schubert to showtunes with dizzying ease. Goodman was born in Cape Town in 1909 and showed his musical talents from an early age, according to Linda Goodman, his daughter from his fourth wife. 'Dad had such a strange childhood – he could play before he could read,' she says, speaking from her home in Wales. 'He started, I think, when he was three and gave his first public performance at seven. He was driven by a very determined mother.' After the death of his father when Goodman was 12, his mother took the family back to London, where she had been born, and remarried. 'The man she married was a textile merchant who thought music was a waste of time,' says Linda. 'He wanted to take the family back to Cape Town and dad was left with the choice to give up his music career and go back to work for the family firm or go it alone at the age of 19 in London.' A year later, Goodman moved to Sydney to take up his appointment as professor of piano at the NSW Conservatorium of Music, where he was to teach, on and off, for 50 years. Linda was just 22 when Goodman died, but has fond recollections of her famous dad – who also had a strong larrikin streak. 'It was an interesting childhood to say the least because he was either practising – at which point mum and I would have to be quiet as mice – or he was enjoying his favourite pastime: listening to the horse racing,' she said. 'I can still remember his TAB account number, I heard it so many times on the phone. 'He was a real character, very moody, very passionate and very sensitive as you would expect. He absolutely adored my mother. The thing I remember most about my childhood was how much my parents loved each other.' The most significant event in Goodman's life came with the outbreak of World War II and his decision in 1942 to join up, not content merely to raise money for the war effort with charity concerts. 'He wanted to be a combat soldier,' says Tedeschi. 'It was a very different Australia then. There was a common cause and he wanted to do his bit.' However, the top brass was reluctant to put Goodman in a fighting role, instead dispatching him with a piano on the back of a truck to some of the remotest parts of Australia where he performed for thousands of servicemen and women in morale-boosting concerts. 'He played wherever men were stationed – men in dirty overalls with dusty, tired faces who thought they had been forgotten by civilisation,' writes Linda's mother, Virginia, in her 1983 biography of her husband. Finally, in 1943, Goodman was sent to New Guinea, where the Allies had halted Japanese attempts to establish a base at Port Moresby but were battling to drive them off the island and away from Australia. The conditions made the outback 'look like a picnic', according to Virginia Goodman. 'Where dirt and dust had been the foes in Australia, New Guinea's tropical terrain and climate were heartbreaking,' she writes. 'The old piano grew green mould on its legs before his eyes, and rot and mildew ate at its guts. Soon it became unplayable and the pianist was not in much better shape.' At one point, schoolchildren in Queensland even took up a collection for Goodman, raising enough money through a penny fund to have a decent piano crated up and sent out to him. In all, Goodman played more than 150 concerts, often by moonlight, to more than 200,000 servicemen and women. He flew from base to base on a rickety DC-3 making terrifying landings on sketchy bush airstrips. Then he would help unload, repair and tune his piano before giving a lengthy recital to troops, many of whom had come directly from jungle fighting in some of the most gruelling battles of the war. Alongside the pressure of the punishing schedule, Goodman never went anywhere without a pistol on his hip faced with the constant threat from Japanese soldiers and unfriendly locals. Unsurprisingly, the workload and stress broke him, and he was eventually evacuated to Melbourne's Heidelberg Psychiatric Hospital with what was described as a 'serious nervous breakdown'. 'He was physically and mentally exhausted. He was never a man in good health,' says Linda. 'He had three heart attacks in his life and had to fight through everything.' It was shortly before leaving New Guinea that Goodman wrote New Guinea Fantasy, the piece that captured Tedeschi's attention so completely when he was a teenager. 'When I play it, I'm reminded of those big Charlton Heston biblical films,' says Tedeschi. 'You get that really big orchestral sound with the brass. It's got that grandiosity that I absolutely love.' Despite its significance, it appears New Guinea Fantasy has not had a live performance in Australia, something Tedeschi will redress at the upcoming Canberra concert, Second World War Memorial: Greater Love. Created by War Memorial artist-in-residence Christopher Latham and narrated by actor John Bell, the concert will also feature 15 new comp o sitions from composers including Elena Kats-Chernin and Graeme Koehne. Loading 'I wanted to describe this idea of a love beyond self, a greater love that took the form of service for the benefit of others, which I find enormously inspiring,' said Latham. 'It still amazes me what people were willing to sacrifice to achieve a peaceful, free, democratic world.' Tedeschi said the concert would be the opposite of the glorification of war. 'Isador truly felt music had a moralistic force,' he said. 'We are more atomised than ever right now, but I have found that a group of people can come in and listen to me play, and for a second or for a minute – or for a whole recital if I'm playing well – none of that matters.' Tedeschi feels a strong affinity with Goodman. 'I wish I had met him because there's a lot that we have in common,' he says. 'We are both Jewish Australians. We are both people who love jazz, who are not immune to playing anywhere. I'll play literally anywhere provided the pianos are of a certain quality. I don't know if my mother would be happy with me playing in a war zone, but I would definitely consider it.' And while Linda is unable to attend the Canberra concert, she is thrilled New Guinea Fantasy is finally getting a public performance. 'The more I listen to that piece the more I think, 'How did you do it in those conditions and in that state of mind?''
