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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ludwig van Beethoven. Clara Schumann. Sergei Rachmaninov. Philip Glass. Some of the famous composers in classical-music history have been fine keyboardists as well.
While pianist Stewart Goodyear is not yet as accomplished as a composer as those famed figures, he is working on it. He will lead, for example, a world-premiere performance of his Octet on July 25 at the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival.
“It’s been wonderful that people are interested in my work and want to commission works from me,” he said from Washington, D.C., where he was getting ready for performances with the National Symphony Orchestra.
But for now, Goodyear is best known as a performer, and it is in that capacity that he will make his Ravinia Festival orchestral debut. The Canadian pianist will serve as soloist for the opening July 15 of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual residency at the venerable summer event in Highland Park.
He will perform Tchaikovsky’s showy Piano Concerto No. 1, choosing the 1894 version most commonly performed. Recent research has shown that this variant of the work was likely completed by a student of the composer, apparently without Tchaikovsky’s knowledge or authorization. Some pianists, like Kirill Gerstein, now perform a new edition of the composer’s 1879 version, which is believed to be the closest to Tchaikovsky’s original intentions. But Goodyear has not followed suit. “I do like the 1879 version,” he said. “I just feel like the version that is being played and that everyone knows, it just feels like a tighter structure. So I just prefer that one.”
The son of a Trinidadian mother and British father, Goodyear discovered music when he was 3 years old and began playing a toy piano by ear a year later. He described himself as a “painfully shy” child, and music was a way of communicating with others. “I always wanted to be social,” said the pianist, now 44. “Music was the way of breaking the ice and having me feel comfortable sharing myself with other people.”
After graduating from the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto at age 15, he went on to study with three noted pianists at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia: Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman and Claude Frank. “What I loved about all three of those teachers is that they were individuals who approached piano playing very differently,” he said. “They just gave me so much knowledge and enriched my life completely in the five years I was at Curtis.” He finished his education with a master’s degree at New York’s Juilliard School.
“I always wanted to be social. Music was the way of breaking the ice and having me feel comfortable sharing myself with other people.” — Stewart Goodyear
Unlike some pianists who gain sudden attention at a competition or with some kind of high-profile appearance, Goodyear has grown his career in a gradual and steady basis. While he has 10 albums to his credit, including “Phoenix,” which was released in October, he is probably best known for his Beethoven “sonathons.” So far in his career, he has done seven of these events in which he performs all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in one day. “In my experience, it’s been really wonderful that audience members want to take in the entire event and take that journey along with me,” he said. Mastering this cycle or set of works, which offer a panorama of technical and artistic challenges, is considered the ultimate challenge in the keyboard world. Most pianists perform these works in several concerts spread across a season, but Goodyear has taken this one-day approach, in part because of how he first he first experienced the cycle.
When he was just 4 years old and browsing at a Toronto outlet of Sam the Record Man, once an iconic Canadian chain of record stores, he convinced his mother to purchase a 13-LP box set of the Beethoven piano sonatas performed by famed soloist Vladimir Ashkenazy. The next day he devoured the recordings, starting in the morning and listening to all them into the evening. “This was not a mission to hear them in one day,” he said. “I just couldn’t get enough. I was binge-listening to Beethoven, and I always heard it as this large set.”
In 2012, when Goodyear set out to perform his first Beethoven cycle in Toronto, he decided to take a similarly compressed approach, starting at 10 a.m. and concluding at 11 p.m. “It felt more comfortable playing them in one day as opposed to spreading them out,” he said. “It’s almost like you have to keep that momentum for a longer time, and it would be more exhausting to do it over a season than in one day.”
Goodyear’s upcoming appearance will be his first opportunity to collaborate with Marin Alsop, Ravinia’s chief conductor and curator. He was 19 when the two met while she was guest-conducting the Curtis Institute orchestra, and he was taken with her and her musicianship. “The forces seemed to align,” he said. “I’m very excited to finally work with her.”
He made his CSO debut in 2003 and returned a year later for a solo recital at Symphony Center. “The Canadian pianist exuded enormous promise a year ago at his Chicago Symphony debut when he played the Beethoven Third Concerto under Daniel Barenboim, and the orchestra was wise to re-engage him,” wrote critic John von Rhein in the Chicago Tribune. “An extraordinary talent such as his deserves careful nurturing.”
Goodyear’s first Ravinia appearance came in November 2000, when he presented a recital in Bennett Gordon Hall. The program featured works by Mozart, Chopin and Prokofiev, as well as one of his own pieces, Variations on Eleanor Rigby. But at the time, he didn’t have a chance to visit the festival’s pavilion, where the July 15 concert will occur, or tour the grounds, all experiences he will assuredly have on his return visit. “This will be very new for me,” he said. “I’m very excited.”
