Reginald Godden

Reginald Godden (born September 18, 1905 in Tunbridge Wells , † March 25, 1987 in Burlington / Ontario ) was a Canadian pianist and music teacher.

Godden's family emigrated to Canada in 1906 and settled in Allendale, where he received piano lessons and worked as a silent film pianist from 1919 to 1928. From 1925 to 1929 he took organ lessons with Healey Willan in Toronto, from 1928 he was a piano student of Ernest Seitz . From 1928 to 1949 and again from 1969 he taught at the Toronto Conservatory of Music (later the Royal Conservatory of Music ). From 1948 to 1953 he was principal of the Hamilton Conservatory , from 1973 to 1978 he taught at York University . His students included Alfred Kunz , Walter MacNutt , Phyllis Mailing , Earle Moss , Kenneth Peacock , Eldon Rathburn, and Harry Somers .

In the 1930s Godden formed a piano duo with Scott Malcolm , with whom he a. a. performed in Toronto, New York and London. From 1940 he studied for five years with Debussy's student E. Robert Schmitz and began a career as a piano soloist. He has given Canadian premieres of piano compositions by Sergei Prokofiev , Dmitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland and premieres of works by Canadian composers such as Harry Somers and John Weinzweig .

In 1956 he played the first complete Canadian performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas , and in the same year it premiered the Second Somers Piano Concerto with the CBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Victor Feldbrill . From 1958 to 1966 Godden lived in San Francisco, where he dealt in particular with the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach .

In 1966 he wrote the piano reduction for Somers' opera Louis Riel in preparation for the premiere, which took place in 1967. In 1977 he performed the Études by Claude Debussy (released as LP in the same year), in 1978 the cycle Ludus tonalis by Paul Hindemith . In collaboration with the musicologist Austin Clarkson , Godden's memoirs were created, which appeared in 1986 under the title Reginald Godden Plays .

Web links

• Records by Reginald Godden in the WorldCat bibliographic database

source

• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Reginald Godden